12 Facts About Altair bus

The Altair bus was the first industry standard expansion Altair bus for the microcomputer industry.

Power supplied on the Altair bus is bulk unregulated +8 Volt DC and ±16 Volt DC, designed to be regulated on the cards to +5 V, -5 V and +12 V for Intel 8080 CPU IC, ±12 V RS-232 line driver ICs, +12 V for disk drive motors.

The Sol-20 used a variation that had only a single 8-bit Altair bus and used the now-unused pins as signal grounds to reduce electronic noise.

Address Altair bus is 16-bits wide in the initial implementation and later extended to 24-bits wide.

Unassigned lines of the original Altair bus specification were later assigned to support more advanced processors.

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One unassigned line of the Altair bus then was reassigned to support the non-maskable interrupt request.

Altair bus then looked for an inexpensive source of connectors, and he came across a supply of military surplus 100-pin edge connectors.

The 100-pin Altair bus was created by an anonymous draftsman, who selected the connector from a parts catalog and arbitrarily assigned signal names to groups of connector pins.

Altair bus had a beer in his hand and when the plane hit a bump, Melen spilt some the beer on Marsh.

The success of these computers, which used IBM's own, incompatible Altair bus architecture, cut deeply into the market for Altair bus products.

Banks of Altair bus computers were used, for example, to process the trades at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange; the United States Air Force deployed Altair bus machines for their mission planning systems.

Market for Altair bus products continued to contract through the early 1990s, as IBM-compatible computers became more capable.