PART 0: PREFACE: COLOPHON, CREDITS, ETC.

This labor of love was started by Kevin Cole (“The Ubuntourist”) in September 2020, in an effort to supplement a Computer Systems course.

Users of this document can test their code with either Ian Davies’ amazing MITS Altair 8800 simulator or, for mere $621 (US), a physical Altair 8800 Clone, complete with toggle switches, blinky red LEDs, etc.

Beginners may find Patrick Jackson’s videos on YouTube quite informative.

In addition to the conversion from scanned printout to searchable HTML, this version contains corrections to typos in the original document, as well as addtional material, particularly regarding the half adder circuit, instructions on assembling and loading code from a Linux system, and a fast forward to 2020 that includes “Hello World” in both GNU Assembler (gas) and Netwide Assembler (nasm).

For a deeper dive into the Intel 8080 CPU, see the Intel 8080 Programming Manual which is unlikely to get converted into HTML by me, alas. It’s a bit 😉 too far.

Conversion from the scanned printout from PDF to HTML (and eventually, a better PDF) was done with pdftoppm (one of the poppler-utils tools), Tesseract-OCR, Inkscape, Sphinx using the Cloud theme, and, of course, the One True Editor (“All Hail!”) 😉.

The printout itself came from a gold mine: Dave Dunfield’s page Daves Old Computers on the Classic Computing site. Serious students and enthusiasts would be well-advised to put on their hard hats and do some mining there. (Canary optional. 😉)

The source and the rendered HTML are hosted on Codeberg.org, because I really like their mission statement

If you spot a problem, you can file an issue.

Some effort was made to contact the copyright holder(s), now that Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), Inc. is no more, but alas, the search was fruitless.

In any case, the original is Copyright © 1975, MITS, Inc.