[whartung]

My first computing experience was with an IMSAI 8080 that class assembled the year before.

It had a keyboard and video board, rather than a terminal. The monitor was open chassis to boot (ah the old days when we didn’t protect children from lethal electricity).

It had a ROM monitor and cassette tape. You had to type in (in hex) a short machine language program into the monitor to load BASIC from a cassette. We simply never turned it off.

I tried ti enter the bootstrap through the front panel once, but I made some mistake, and it didn’t work. It was an awful enough experience I never tried again.

[jmount]

Ah man- the power supply in the IMSAI 8080 was scary enough, plus you had the monitor power supply open. Fun times- the "book" sequence on ours was "fat finger in the paper tape reading software, read the cassette IO software from paper tape, load BASIC from cassette, and good to go."