Altair 8800: the empty box that started an industry
The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics arrived on newsstands on December 19, 1974, and the machine on its cover did not exist. What editor Les Solomon had photographed was an empty aluminum chassis — no circuit boards, no components — because MITS hadn’t finished building one in time for the shoot. Solomon named the computer himself that afternoon, after his daughter Lauren reminded him that the Enterprise was heading to Altair that night in a rerun of Star Trek. The resulting headline, “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models,” was technically premature. It turned out to be true anyway.
The machine was the Altair 8800, designed by H. Edward Roberts at a company called MITS — Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems — out of a strip mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Roberts was a former Air Force engineer who had run MITS into the ground selling calculator kits until a Japanese price war in 1974 left him roughly $300,000 in debt. The Altair was a last bet on Intel’s new 8080 processor, which he had negotiated down to $75 a chip from the standard OEM price of $360.
For $439 — or $621 assembled — you received a kit containing an Intel 8080 running at 2 MHz, 256 bytes of RAM, and a front panel studded with toggle switches and red LEDs. There was no keyboard, no display, no operating system, no software. To program the Altair you flipped switches in binary patterns. To read the output you watched which lights blinked. It was a computer in the strictest technical sense: it could store and execute instructions. Using it resembled, more than anything else, a sustained argument with a traffic light.
MITS received 1,000 orders in February 1975. By August the number was over 5,000.
Among the people who read that Popular Electronics cover in January was Paul Allen, then working as a programmer for Honeywell in Boston, who brought the magazine to his friend Bill Gates and told him they needed to write software for it immediately. Within days they sent Roberts a letter claiming they had an Altair BASIC interpreter ready. They had nothing. Over the following eight weeks, working on a PDP-10 mainframe, Allen built an 8080 simulator so they could develop code without ever touching an actual Altair. When Allen flew to Albuquerque in February 1975 to demonstrate the interpreter to Roberts, it was the first time the program ran on real hardware. It worked on the first try. Gates left Harvard shortly after and moved to Albuquerque; the company they founded as “Micro-Soft” outlasted MITS by several decades.
Meanwhile, a loose collective of engineers called the Homebrew Computer Club had begun meeting at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park to swap Altair tricks and circuit diagrams. Two members who attended early meetings were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Apple Computer was incorporated the following year.
Roberts sold MITS in 1977, went to medical school in Georgia, and practiced family medicine for the rest of his life. He showed almost no interest in revisiting the machine he had built. The Altair sold in quantities that look modest now — a few tens of thousands — but it was the right provocation at the right moment, cheap enough and strange enough that the people who would shape the next decade all felt compelled to respond to it.
The rest of the response was the industry.
Sources
- Altair 8800 — Wikipedia — pricing ($439 kit, $621 assembled), naming origin (Les Solomon, Star Trek, Lauren Solomon), Gates and Allen’s development timeline, order figures.
- Computer History Museum — Personal Computers — MITS background, Ed Roberts and the hobbyist community, the mock-up cover photograph, the Homebrew Computer Club.
- Altair BASIC — Wikipedia — Gates and Allen’s PDP-10 simulator approach, the Albuquerque demonstration, the founding of Micro-Soft.