• Bringing new life to the Altair 8800 on Azure Sphere - Microsoft Tech Community
    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things/bringing-new-life-to-the-altair-8800-on-azure-sphere/ba-p/2554337
    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/296251iB9FD1335EC54DD9D?v=v2

    Toujours fascinant le rétro-computing.

    I love embedded IoT development and when a colleague asked if I’d be interested in working on cloud-enabling an Altair 8800 emulator running on Azure Sphere then I seized the opportunity. I’m fascinated by tech and retro computing and this project combined both interests and hopefully, it will inspire you to fire up this project, learn about the past and connect to the future.

    The MITS Altair 8800 was built on the Intel 8080. The Intel 8080 was the second 8-bit microprocessor manufactured by Intel, clocked at 2MHz, with a 16-bit address bus to access a whopping 64 KB of RAM. This was back in 1974, yes, that’s 47 years ago. The Altair 8800 is considered to be the computer that sparked the PC revolution and kick-started Microsoft and Apple.

    You can learn more about the Altair at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800.

    thumbnail image 2 of blog post titled Bringing new life to the Altair 8800 on Azure Sphere

    Altair 8800 image attribution: File:Altair 8800, Smithsonian Museum.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

    The first release of the Altair 8800 was programmed by flipping switches, then came paper tape readers to load apps, monitors and keyboards, and floppy disk drive storage, revolutionary at the time. The first programming language for the machine was Altair BASIC, the program written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Microsoft’s first product.

    Interest in the Altair 8800 is not new and there are several implementations of the Open-Source Altair 8800 emulator running on various platforms, and if you are keen, you can even buy an Altair 8800 clone. The Altair 8800 running on Azure Sphere builds on Open-Source projects and brings with it something unique, which is to modernize and cloud-enable the Altair. Bringing 21st century cloud technologies to a computer generation that predates the internet.

    #Histoire_numérique #Altair