WHIPPLEWAY

In 1975 a friend bought one of the original Altair 8800 kits that appeared in that January's Popular Electronics Magazine. It was one of the first do it yourself microcomputer projects using the relatively new Intel 8080 microprocessor. There was no keyboard or screen; no way to externally store and retrieve programs; and, for that matter, no programs. What you received was a front panel with LEDs and switches along with a whopping 256 bytes of memory. Not megabytes or kilobytes, but bytes!... Finding an Altair today is not easy, so my son (John Whipple) and I created the online Front Panel 8080 emulator using JavaScript. With it, you can experience the fun of... watching LEDs flash. The emulator is capable of running the simplest, three line program or a complex program like my version of Tiny BASIC.