humorous if off topic (follows on to: Byte Magazine: 18 Vintage issues...)

[gumby@zembu.com (D. Henkel-Wallace)]

   From: Michael Black <blackm00@CAM.ORG>
   Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 11:58:16 -0400

   What appears on the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics was
   not a working Altair, but a mockup made specifically for purposes
   of having it's photo on the cover of the magazine.

   Now we should speculate on what happened to that Altair lost in
   transit.  Will it show up someday under a pile of other stuff,
   unopened?  Did someone steal it years ago, seeing a piece of
   electronic equipment and figuring it was worth stealing?  Did
   someone realize what it was, and steal it as a result?  In the
   former case, it may have been trashed when he tried to fence it and
   nobody knew what it was.  In the latter, someone may have it this
   day, but just as with stolen art, cannot share it with anyone else.

Slightly off topic but it gives the flavor of the times.

In 1979 I had a friend (hi Barry!) working at a computer store in
Cambridge, Mass, near MIT.  I think it had the euphonious name of
something like "The computer store 10011".

Anyway, they were broken into one night.  They'd just received a
shipment of disk drives (remember 8-inch floppies?) and, if I
remember, some of those spanking new Atari 400's.  The theives had all
night to strip the place, and to the owner's shock, when he came in
the next morning...

...all the monitors were gone!


We had much amusement imagining the reactions of the fences when the
theives tried to dispose of the goods: "Hey, where's the TV channel
dial!?"

-d