Navigate to the Altair 8800 Project docs for the complete documentation.
Welcome to the Altair 8800 emulator repo. If you are interested in retrocomputing, software development, computer fundamentals, and cloud services you've arrived at the right repo.
The Altair 8800 kick-started the personal computer revolution. You can learn more about the Altair on the Altair 8800 Wikipedia page.
The Altair 8800 Emulator runs on POSIX compatible operating systems including Raspberry Pi, Desktop Linux, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and macOS on Apple Silicon and Intel.
The project introduces computer fundamentals with a climate sustainability theme and software development. The Altair project can run standalone and is a fantastic safe way to explore machine-level programming, Intel 8080 Assembly programming, along with C and BASIC development. All the source code is provided under an MIT License.
Optionally, the project integrates with free cloud services from Open Weather Map weather and pollution services, along with Azure IoT Central, and Azure Anomaly Detection Cognitive Service.
What will you learn about:
- Safe low-level machine and assembly programming.
- Software development in BASIC and C.
- Programming the Altair 8800 emulator with the virtual front panel.
- How to extend the Intel 8080 input/output ports to integrate with cloud services.
- Weather and pollution cloud services
- Azure services, including IoT, Stream Analytics, Anomaly detection.
Altair 8800 image attribution - Smithsonian Museum
The Altair 8800 was built on the Intel 8080 CPU, the second 8-bit microprocessor manufactured by Intel in 1974. By today's standards, it's a simple CPU design, perfect for learning computing fundamentals because of its small instruction set.
The original Altair 8800 was programmed by setting switches on the front panel. It was a painstaking, error-prone process to load and run a program. The Altair 8800 had a series of LEDs and switches that you used to load apps and determine the state of the Altair.
You could save and load applications from a paper tape reader connected to the Altair 8800. As the Altair 8800 grew in popularity, more options became available. You could attach a keyboard, a computer monitor, and finally disk drives, a more reliable way to save and load applications.
Learn more from the Altair 8800 Project Wiki.