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.
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."
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.