[sebhc] H8 hardware request - docs, info

Lee Hart leeahart at earthlink.net
Sun Apr 11 14:12:41 CDT 2004


Eric J. Rothfus wrote:
> I'd be willing to participate in any board-creation activities.

This makes me wonder. I used to have an H8, but sold it long ago. Now
all I have are H89s. It's a fine computer, but much less hacker-friendly
than the H8. I often get nostalgic for my ol' H8.

A couple months ago, I stumbled across the original January 1975 Popular
Electronics article on the MITS Altair 8800. In my humble opinion, this
was the "hole in the dike" that started the flood of home computers. It
was a "real" computer; not a trainer or toy. It was cheap; only $350 in
kit form, under $100 if you bought the parts yourself and made your own
boards (the article had the schematics, parts lists, and board layouts
were free!).

Now, in reality, the 8800 was a *terrible* design, loaded with bugs and
with no software and no hardware available to actually *do* any of the
things it promised. Nevertheless, THOUSANDS of people bought them and
built them, and an entire industry grew up making hardware and software
to actually deliver on the promise of the Altair 8800. Bill Gates got
his start writing BASIC for this computer, and the Zenith Z-100 came out
of its design.

Now, looking at that old article, and looking at the prices that an
Altair 8800 inspires on Ebay, I got to wondering if one could build a
*new* version of it. I updated the design a bit, to correct the bugs and
to use modern ICs that we can get today. I added up the price list, and
amazingly, the total cost for all the parts and PC boards (less cabinet)
is well under $100. (The cabinet alone is about $150).

But after talking it over with people on the comp.os.cpm list, I decided
such a project didn't make sense. It would be a copy, not an original,
and so of no interest to collectors. It would still have most of the
design bugs and limitations, and so not be useful for any kind of 'real'
computing. So, I shelved the idea.

But...

To me, the Heath H8 was the Altair 8800 done *right*. It really worked.
It really did have all the hardware and software to make it a *real*
computer, capable of doing useful work. The manuals were great! Anyone
who could read could build it. The design "bugs" were relatively few,
and fixes for them well-known (gold-plated bus connectors, 0-org, Z80
CPU, etc).

So... would it make sense to build a *new* H8 kit? Update the design to
include all the basic fixes, and use modern parts (74HC instead 74LS,
Z80 instead of 8080, modern bytewide memories, etc.).

As for the 8800, I suspect that if I added up all the parts, they would
cost under $100. The cabinet is the only really expensive part. What
would you do for it? Substitute something cheap and easy to buy and/or
make, but that doesn't look anything like the original? Or spend the
extra money to somehow tool up or build something very much like the
original?

What do you folks think?
--
"Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the
world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has!" -- Margaret Meade
--
Lee A. Hart  814 8th Ave N  Sartell MN 56377  leeahart_at_earthlink.net

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