As discussed earlier, MIDI signals are able to be sent and received from the board, so now I am working on adding a PS2 keyboard interface option.  This particular IBM keyboard seems to work just fine, without having to do any communications on "wake up" before it will talk to an external device.  However, it did suffer from breakage of the original mini-DIN connector, many years ago, and rather than try to repair it at the time, I simply went out and bought another one.  Just like nearly everyone else in our modern throw-away society, where if you had to pay someone to fix something, it all too often will cost more than a new one.  Well, for now, maybe I will go ahead and put a DB9 connector on the keyboard since there is actually a standard for that, and then I am also adding a connection to my MIDI interface dongle, which is starting to look like it could turn into a mini-Altair in its own right.

For now, the LED board is incomplete, and does "nothing", but at least the interface board is sending +5V to the MIDI cable and getting MIDI data back, with the PS2 interface to be added next.  This will greatly simplify testing - if I decide to go ahead and connect it, using jumper wires, to an Arduino 2560.  Of course, as I noticed just yesterday, the "Arduino Every", might turn out to be the ideal path to take for this particular device.

Yet, a bunch of stuff comes to mind.  While on the one hand, there are other Altair emulators out there, those, for the most part, tend to emulate the features of the 8800A front panel, leaving out some otherwise very interesting, and well as potentially useful features of the 8800B.  In particular, the 8800B version of the Altair, has some front panel switches that do things like "load and/or display the contents of the accumulator", as well as "reading and/or writing to specified I/O" ports.

Now I really don't want to go full Monty on this, with a design that might somehow display the contents of ALL the CPU registers, on row after row of blinking lights, just like the old UNIVAC display consoles that Irwin Allen repurposed, well, you know, in "Lost In Space", and "The Time Tunnel", and I think even in the basement of the "Towering Inferno."  Now imagine that one - a computer-controlled building?  Now, who would have thought of that?  Then there was the time that Starbuck and Apollo had to infiltrate a Cylon Base Star so that they could blow up the Base Star's control center.  I think that that one was a two-part episode, from the original series, entitled "The Living Legend".  Lots of blinking lights, and worth checking out.