Altair 8800

January 1975 Popular Electronics cover story by Ed Roberts and William Yates about the MITS Altair "personal minicomputer."

"This announcement ranks with IBM's announcement of the System/360 a decade earlier as one of the most significant in the history of computing." -- (2, 226)

Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS)
Model rocket shop in Albuquerque, NM
Kit price $400
Designed by H. Edward Roberts

- Intel 8080 processor
- IC memory of 256 bytes
- bus architecture
- at $400, it is 10 times cheaper than a mini

- not very reliable
- not very well designed
- hard to assemble

- input: the front panel of switches
- output:  read the lights
- only 256 bytes of memory

What do you do with it?
- play games

These notes are taken primarily from (1) and (2). Need specific citations.

Captures the attention of the calculator and computer hobby clubs.

Bus architecture allows improvements
- increase memory
- connect TTY
- connect TV and keyboard
- store its program on audio tape (memory lost on power down)
- 1975 "Kansas City Standard" for audio tones
- connect floppy

1977 Altair and clones (IMSAI)
- charging for software
- MS Basic in ROM
- CP/M disk operating system for 8" floppies
- serial, parallel port
- printers, keyboards, monitors

Other versions of the Altair story from Stan Veit, a Computer Editor of Popular Electronics. (Or at least that's what he says!)

A view that the MITS Altair was not the first personal computer.

Notes

1. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Basic Books, 1996).

2. Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

Bibliography

"Welcome to the Obsolete Technology Website," http://oldcomputers.net/index.html (oldcomputers.net, accessed 2004 Nov 26). These pages have a timeline from 1971-1989 and information on several dozen personal computers from that period.