On 22 Feb 2022, Mike Powell said the following...

The Altaid kit is basically another Membership Card but is based on an 8 CPU, as was the 1975 Altair 8800. This provides opportunity for a furthe pun:
Altaid 8800. :)

Some of these sound interesting but, since I never used one, I am not
sure how much I would get out of it. My first computer was a TI99/4A,
and my second was an XT clone. Both are sitting on the desk behind me
and still work, although both are currently out of commission as my work-from-home equipment is sitting on top of them.

The membership kits would be similar to the TI, although the TMS9900 was severly crippled in those models. I have one, too; have you checked out the TIPI module to get yours online?

The Membership cards, at their most basic level, provide a switch/LED
interface by which you can toggle in programs, byte by byte, and run them. However, I think that all of them also have some kind of serial interface, whether RS-232 or USB-compatible TTL. At any rate, with the ROMs supplied by Lee, once you connect to the computer from a terminal via serial, you are presented with a menu allowing you to do things like mass-import or -export ranges of memory, examine registers, change values at memory locations, reset the Program Counter, etc. They also usually have some variant of BASIC that
you can use. For those kits that don't have storage options, capturing and resending data from the terminal is the only way to save and load programs.

I did see something the other day in a FB BBS group where someone had cobbled together a working dial-up modem. That might get more immediate use here. My supply of working, vintage modems has dwindled down to one or two, and I still have dial-up. :)

That would be interesting. I've seen plenty of project to make a WiFi modem with all of the traditional blinking lights and whatnot, but I haven't seen
any involving an actual telephone connection.

I did play around with the Hercules (???) project some, and briefly had a "working mainframe" environment on a spare PC. That is something I have some familiarity with, although the OSes I am familiar with are still
very much copyrighted and not available to the regular hobbiest.

I have a Pi dedicated to that as well :) Although I haven't been able to
spend as much time on it as I'd like, I did find Moshix's Youtube videos
about Hercules and MVS 3.8j extremely helpful.

In addition to emulating PDP-8s and -11s, as in the PiDP projects, SiMH can also emulate a VAX. HP, the owners of VMS (via Compaq) used to offer
yearly hobbyist licenses for VMS, but has discontinued doing so the last few years.

Jeff.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: Cold War Computing BBS (1:387/26)