Altair “MITS-MAS” Catalog

Page 33: Special Altair® MITS-MAS Christmas CatalogThese pages, featuring minicomputer kits and peripherals from the MITSAltair product line, were originally clipped from the December 1975 issue ofPopular Electronics magazine.
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Apple Fat Mac

The original brown toaster. 512 KB (not MB) of RAM, 512x384 1-bit (black or white) graphics, no hard disk, and a steal at just $2200 or so. The last Mac I owned until 2003.

Sharp PC-4501

Looking for the chipmunk trap and found my old laptop, so to speak, covered in dust and cat vomitus. A PC-4501 with an 80186 processor (7.16 MHz, though you could slow it down in the BIOS, if that was too fast for you.) Lead acid battery, two 3.5" drives, CGA graphics. I remember playing SimCity on this puppy. Still boots
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Acorn Electron

Acorn made some great computers - I still have fond memories of the BBC Micro and the version of BASIC it ran. The Electron was another good computer from the company.

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Amiga CD32 console

Not one of Commodore's better ideas, but from memory it had a few good games. I look forward to seeing what the kids think

Dick Smith Wizzard

The Dick Smith Wizzard was a rebadged Video Technology CreatiVision. The odd controls combined to form a single membrane keyboard, allowing it to be used as a computer.

Microbee Computer-In-A-Book

MicroBee were an Australian computer manufacturer that was, for a time, popular with Australian hobbyists. Their first computer looked much like this, but was a kit - an uncle built it, and thus started my interest in computing. This version kept the disk drive and power supply in one of the books. Unfortunately, if you followed what the design suggested and kept the books on a book case, there was a tendency for the power supply to overheat. Although this design showed up a bit later, the first MicroBee kit hit the market in 1982.

Spectravideo 318

The first computer we owned was a Spectravideo 328. My father picked it, having argued - correctly, as I recall - that it was a better computer that the Commodore 64. The 318 had less memory, a crappy keyboard, and the built in joystick. I've seen other versions with a red joystick, so I'm not sure why the difference in appearance here - perhaps this was a later, more sedate, model?

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