war games is mentioned certainly in the
ready player one book but um i don't
know if it's in the film i haven't seen
the film yet um what what was inside
8080 why does it look remarkably like
the front of an altar
uh
because it was based on an altar maybe
the mci 8080 was a machine that come out
not long after the altar it's an s 100
bus based machine so s 100 means that it
had a connector had a back plane but
there was a hundred connections which
carried the data bus address bus and all
the control lines for the processor the
back plane didn't do anything it was
just a bunch of connectors you'd have a
a cpu board maybe a ram board maybe a
serial board you could expand it so
effectively it was it was pretty much
the same as the altair but it kind of
looked nice with its nice big switches a
little bit sort of pdp-8 style switches
nice big ones there the leds that would
light up on the front um so kind of a
sexy looking outer they remind me of
almost the front of a of an old vcr yeah
now i can see some of them say address
some of them say data some of some say
input i mean how does it how would it
work you literally toggle in
binary data um and the leds would light
up on the panel there
with your binary output from it so if
you want to write data to address xero
ff then you would convert that into
binary you would toggle that binary in
and then you in the same way you would
toggle in
the the data that goes there and that's
it so it's very very time consuming but
actually i mean everybody talks about
that and the way the altair is done and
it is a very very slow and serious
process but quite often what you would
be doing is just toggling in a few lines
of code or maybe just a jump even that
would jump to a bit of code in memory
that would then initialize the disk
drive or the tape or whatever um so
what they call bootloader code just to
jump the machine into life and get it
into its peripherals so you've got the
address bus there you can set the
address and then you've got your data
and you can toggle that in as well and
that way you can basically it's like a
poke command in basic you can poke data
into a certain memory location yes you
can use them like that but ultimately
these things you could have a serial
port if you had a serial port you could
hook up a terminal um you might have a
rom in there which might be basic or
you'd load basic info or anything else
maybe cpm from a disk tape whatever
interfaces you had connected to it you
could get your data in and out so it's
not like we all just sat there toggling
in code day after day um in binary a few
people did um but you know these things
were a bit more usable than that i
remember when we looked in the altair
there were all sorts of upgrades and
changes and would that be quite common
on one of these as well that people
would just add their own different
boards yeah i mean these machines were
for enthusiasts you know the people that
were buying these um quite often were
electronics e kind of people um so yeah
you would buy one and you would just
keep making it better and the same as
everybody does with their pcs you know
more ram more speed more power it was
exactly the same so yeah the altair the
original outside that we have isn't
really much of an out air lift you know
it was upgraded so much this one was a
bit different it's had a bigger back
plane in it so it's got a a toy's back
plane there so you can plug in more
boards and you know same thing would
have been going on let's upgrade it we
need more ram for our applications
you're really into computers huh yeah
it looks to me like kind of quite a
professional machine so it's probably
bending reality to have had the hacker
keyed with it sitting on his bookcase
yeah i mean these things weren't cheap
so you know they were um you know
reasonably good money so
whether matthew lightman was his name i
think um uh nice broderick something
lightman like i remember um yes
was uh
um
yeah would have afforded to have one of
those machines in his bedroom i don't
know because it's the machine it's just
about to see a picture of their machine
um you've got the terminal that went
next to it you had his little speaker
box um so he could speak
um and his vhs player on the shelf there
that's a fair old amount of money's
worth of gear um but maybe his parents
were loaded i don't know um
but uh but there you go he had one and
they i mean were they bending it a bit
with things like the speaker do you want
to hear it talk i mean what sort of
hardware would you have needed to have
made a computer of that era talk um i
mean there was basic speech synthesis
out there so it's it's feasible make
mistakes yes they do how can i talk
maybe it spoke a bit better than the
actual real um speech synthesizers did
at the time i mean i can't remember when
the spo 256 came out which is a chip
which is a speech synth chip you were
linking those up to early
and things but i mean speech synthesis
has been around some time so um it was
kind of feasible
maybe normally on computer file we get
the lid off we have a look around but
this particular one's being refurbished
yeah so this one is a bit of an empty
shell at the minute so we have one of
our volunteers has kindly taken the
boards out um and um it's getting them
working so we've got there's a processor
card in a ram card um the s100 is pretty
standard so you can test it in other
machines uh the altair he's already done
so we now will very shortly have an
altair where you can well you could
toggle in the data if you want but we
probably won't um but we will be able to
load in the little program to just fill
up with timing loops and as those timing
loops play interferes with the radio the
radio then creates tones
and you've got music and apparently
there was this sort of reward given for
the first um thing that they they really
made an outer do of any use if you call
that of any use um but that is music of
course it is um so yeah
so that will be working but also the
next thing is get the insight working as
well um so we're just getting the boards
uh done uh then we'll refurbish the
machine itself
hopefully you better come here and have
a play and we can take it to that gate
because yellow key yellow castle and we
can get in there now we have
what could possibly be a sword
or maybe just an arrow
so um so we can now take that one and we
can come out is it one thing at a time
though yeah yeah
so you've got to have the right things
at the right time
um so we can go
this way oh but we can't