I remember DOS 3.3 on a 640x480 screen - and my girlfriend who had a first-generation Macintosh looking over my shoulder saying "I don't like the way your computer is all text and the way everyhing moves up the screen as you type ..."
Ha! Apples were for kids who liked picture books, REAL computers were IBM compatibles! I felt SO superior

How things (including myself) have changed since then.

I can do a bit more than talking about it, I can show it to yas on this outdated website:

http://tinyurl.com/yazh3pd

The pictures were taken several years ago after 30+years in my basement...

This was followup up by:

MOS Technology Kim-1 (single-board computer)
Sinclair ZX-81 & several Timex TS-1000s
Timex TS-2068 (with Spectrum ROMswitch)
Apple II+ with PCPI CP/M card & a ($700!) 20mb hard drive
Radio Shack TRS80 with Pickles & Trout CP/M
Kaypro 4-84 (CP/M
Morrow MD-2 (CP/M)

Then, in the early 90s, my first IBM-compatible, a 486-66, followed by a series of updates & replacements that continues to this day.

Until recently, I still had 'em all, but space constraints have resulted in my getting rid of many of them.

That rocks dude!

PS: Your website is cool.

Wow, what an amazing piece of work, how long did it take you to put it together? What did you actually program it to do? Fantastic

Thanks. Honestly, it was so long ago that I don't recall the time frame involved in getting it to that state. It started out similar to the simplified version shown in the Popular Electronics picture. Then, I decided I wanted to fully decode and display the full address & data buses, add more memory, etc. So I designed circuitry to do that and wirewrapped the changes. Everything wasn't done all at once -- I'd add functionality when it occurred to me. As a guess, I'd say that it went from barebones to its final state as shown in the pictures in a year or so. The individual updates didn't take lone -- wirewrapping is very quick -- a few hours or a couple of days, at most. (assuming no wiring or design errors...)

Programs were loaded a byte-at-a-time, using a very sparse 'operating system' called ETOPS, (Elf Toggle Operating System) which made it a little easier to enter data. Everything was straight machine code represented by hexadecimal digits set in the toggle switches. Once the program was entered, you had to specify the starting address in memory, press the "Run" button and then start troubleshooting why it didn't do what you wanted it to do...

The most 'sophisticated' application I wrote for it was a telephone dialer, which was accomplished by hooking a relay across the phone line and having the computer pulse-dial a number by opening and closing the contacts the correct number of times for a given digit, using the phone company's pulse dialing specifications. Once a number was programmed in, it could dial faster than you could on a real telephone, but it took more time to enter the number into memory than it would to pick up a phone. It was just a programming exercise, really.

Tiny Basic was available for the Elf, but I moved to the Kim-1, which I could hook directly up to a Teletype machine. So the Elf remained my only computer for a relatively short time -- a year or two, maybe.

Thank you, Captain. I also like your Starship!