The Altair 8800 microcomputer goes on sale. It’s the small start of a big trend toward small things.
A small New Mexico company—with the big name of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems and the small name of MITS—manufactured the Altair as a do-it-yourself kit. Founder Ed Roberts got the name Altair from the star destination in a Star Trek episode.
The Altair’s heart was an Intel 8080 microprocessor with the remarkable capacity of 8 bits, or 1 byte. The kit offered a 256-byte memory, enough to contain one sentence of text. The Altair’s open, 100-line bus structure evolved into the S-100 standard. Keyboard? That was a few years in the future. Input was accomplished through the Sense Switches, eight toggles on the front panel. Monitor? Nope. Output was accomplished through LEDs on the front panel: high tech for 1974.
The Altair 8800 kit sold for just under $400 (more than $1,800 in today’s money). Without the case, the kit was under $300. Or you could order everything fully assembled for $595. To soup it up, MITS offered a few peripherals: a video card, a serial card for connecting to a terminal, a 64KB RAM-expansion card, and an 8-inch floppy drive. The floppies stored 300 KB each.
The Altair excited Paul Allen and Bill Gates, who wrote the first microcomputer BASIC for the 8800 and, within months, went on to found Microsoft (see here). MITS sold more than 2,000 Altairs by the end of 1975. The Commodore PET and the Apple II, complete with keyboards and monitors, both debuted in 1977. Altairs went out of production in 1978.
Microsoft and Intel are still around. You noticed?—RA