Scott... Funny you should mention Altair, my dad and I built one of these in 1975 when they came out. It was a kick soldering in all the components, then finally programming the beast by hand through the front panel (a program of say 150 steps would only take somewhere around 1000 switch flips!). A month or two later we got really fancy and bought a 13" Zenith (Black and White of course) television and a conversion kit, made by Pickles and Trout (have no clue why I remember that name), that required using a soldering iron to cut an access panel in the back and removing a few pieces and piggybacking a small board into it, to produce a monitor. Over the next several years we had every input device known to man, including punch tape, cassette tape, burning EPROM's, and finally 8" floppies. Adding a keyboard required an extra card. My dad got a hold of a model 19 teletype and converted it into a printer at a blistering 13 baud (about 60 characters per second, yes characters, not words!). My dad helped Wang develop Tiny Basic, and things took off from there. The operating system we ended up with was CP/M and many of the commands there still work today in DOS mode. For my birthday one year my dad got an entire copy of the CP/M library. At the time it was the only shareware available, and required 65 floppies at a cost of about $3.50 each. No wonder a technique was developed to cut an extra write protect notch in the disk and then flip them over to write on both sides.

I can remember being shocked the first time I saw computers being sold preassembled, absolutely heresy, kind of like buying a mobile home instead of a house! [Linked Image]