on it running...
on it running in its own addresses, and it didn’t have to have all the
normal chips to decide, “Well, if the addresses are such and such, I will respond
to them.” That was done on the main board. In the Altair world, each board you
had to dial in the address that it would look at, and that took a couple of thumbwheel
switches to dial the address on (they cost money), and a bunch of chips
that would compare the address coming from the microprocessor to the one
that they were good for, to see if they equaled, and that cost about 5 chips a
board. So if you had 8 boards, that would be 40 chips. In my case, I used
2 chips, and I had double sets of address to all 8 boards already in 2 chips
instead of 40. So I was very proud of that.
Now Steve said, “All people really need is a printer and a modem.” And that
was just false because he’d come from a different world than I. He’d never
done software and he’d never really been around computer users. He’d been
around Hewlett-Packard where they make them, but he hadn’t been around
computer users that plug in boards that do an oscilloscope out of a computer
board, and another board that controls some equipment on the factory and runs
some motors, and all these little boards that were just a big part of my life.
Every computer I’d ever seen, some of its greatest things came because of
boards plugged into it. And he wanted just one slot for a printer and one for a
modem. Today, we’re sort of in a much different, freer world.
| ← gold.) So he | We got the → |