Altair 8800
More info
- Creator
- MITS (Ed Roberts)
- Released
- 1975
- Type
- Microcomputer
- Processor
- Intel 8080
A box of switches and lamps sold as a kit — and the starting gun for both the home computer and Microsoft.
MITS announced the Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975. It was built on Intel's 8080, had 256 bytes of memory and lacked both keyboard and screen: you entered programs with switches on the front panel and read results off LEDs. Demand came in several orders of magnitude above what MITS had planned for.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen read the advertisement, phoned MITS and claimed to have a BASIC interpreter ready. They did not, but they wrote it in six weeks against a simulator of the 8080 — and founded Microsoft to sell it. The Altair's expansion bus became the S-100 standard, and the machine gave its name to the home computer wave that followed.