Should I consider this for my MITS 8800?
If you don't want it anymore I'd happily trade you a much better box to put a modern computer in. Or if you go through with it I'll pay shipping for the bits you rip out.
A couple decades ago the march of progress gave us some really small motherboard form factors, and from that technological awakening spawned the everlasting joy of
Mini-ITX.com, the website where no container, including "vintage" computers galore, was safe from having a lackluster PC stuck inside of it. These days, of course, you can get a lot more powerful computers in even smaller packages, but... I dunno, I still treasure the old days, and if I ever need a reminder why sleepers are, uhm, pretty freaking lame, I know where to go.
To be fair, some of these things were decently tasteful:
But if I'm honest it's the complete and utter abortions that keep my love alive.
Doesn't count--it's built on a clone..
I don't see why that matters since you'd be gutting it and just using the case anyway. Unless your goal is to upset people because you trashed a real Altair...
Yeah, I guess I'm going to echo
@Plasma and ask what the actual angle is here. If your plan is to just gut an Altair 8800 and use it as a stupidly expensive box to stick a gamer PC into I don't think anyone's going to be particularly impressed with the technical virtuosity of the feat. Not to say some people aren't going to find this cool, there's those people out there who pay four figures just to use objectively kind of terrible keyboards salvaged from mainframe terminals on their PCs because they love the aesthetic of it. (I wonder if these are the same people who subscribe to those Youtube channels where some shreking spoiled-ass kid farms views by vandalizing Lamborginis and other tiresome displays of "I'm too rich to care".)
I mean, it's your thing to do what you will with. It just kind of feels very... conspicuous consumption-y? Maybe you could sell it to Mr. Beast when you were finished with it.
I dunno, personally I kind of feel like Sleepers have genuinely been done to death and, let's face it, an Altair is roomier inside than many PC cases so it's not really going to be much a physical feat to stuff a bloodcurdling-ly powerful motherboard and video card and whatever else qualifies as a "big drive train" inside. You don't even really need to modify it at all; just yank a few cards out and you'll have enough room to stow a laptop inside that outspecs the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1975 by more than five orders of magnitude if you count the GPU. And of course this is eight or nine orders of magnitude compared to the original 8-bit CPU.
This is roughly the equivalent of taking a Ford Model T and making it capable of traveling approximately 6% of the speed of light and, again, this is by just chucking a gamer laptop or one of the higher spec Intel/ASUS NUCs loosely into the box. (IE, to stretch this bad metaphor a bit, you didn't even bother taking out the original motor, you just used some twist ties to hang a box near that goofy thing that they use instead of a distributor) Go completely ape and spend mid-five figures on the fattest GPUs you can find you'll add another zero to the end and *really* be able to enjoy those relativistic effects.
Are you planning to make the switches do anything that contributes to the final product, or are they just going to sit there dead? (I dunno, maybe you could split the difference and wedge a microcontroller behind the front panel that makes them blink randomly at first, and then move up to having them able to control an Altair emulator? I mean, it's not a unique idea, that's what all the replicas do, but this would be the *expensive* version.)
Honestly what seems to be more in vogue these days is add-ons for vintage computers that don't involve "gutting" them, it's all about wedging some device into them that massively enhances the apparent functionality of them (IE, can at least with some plausible deniability be described as an "upgrade"), but is really a fast embedded computer that uses a little ball of CPLD/FPGA logic and clever software to take over the old machine and wear it like a skin suit. Poster child for this is the
PiStorm "upgrade" for Commodore Amigas, which actually converts your Amiga 500/1000/2000 into a somewhat awkward set of peripherals for a Raspberry Pi SBC.
It's not *quite* the same thing, but
there are a number of boards out there for wedging Raspberry Pis and other small SBCs into an S100 card slot and using them as master or slave CPUs. You could always go that route; I mean, it still gives you the bragging points of having a CPU a bazillionty times bigger inside. But I guess if you just want an Altair-boxed gaming PC that's not going to scratch that itch.
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