Altair 8800 microcomputer

<p>Machine has a non-standard fan in the back of the machine. There is a silver "MITS ALTAIR 8800 COMPUTER" label on the bottom of the face plate. The Altair 8800 kit was introduced as the cover story on the January 1975 edition of Popular Electronics. Though 'home-brew' experimental systems exsisted well before the Altair, none had the Altair's wide- reaching popularity. Word length: 8 bits. CPU Circuitry: Intel 8080. Primary Memory: 256 Bytes. Price: $ 397. The Altair inspired Bill Gates, then at Harvard University, to write a BASIC assembler so that users could easily program the machine. This was the start of Microsoft. MITS was sold to Pertec and the Altair line did not last long. Exhibit label: The Altair 8800 is commonly thought of as the first successful "personal computer" or "PC." Ed Roberts, the creator os the machine, coined the term; he saw the personal computer as distinct from hobby machines, development systems, and industrial machines in that the PC would run programs designed for larger computers while remaining affordable and retaining a conventional console interface. Roberts' company, MITS, built calculators and terminal systems throughout the early 1970s, but "when we found out about the Intel 8080 in late 1973, we started design on the Altair, which was finished in the summer of 1974." Initially, programs had to be entered a line at a time with the switches on the front panel. Soon, MITS and other manufactureres were offering expansion memory boards, and the 4K BASIC interpreter written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen (original paper tape on display at The Computer Museum) became a standard. The demand for the $395.00 machine exceeded MITS' wildest expectations. More machines were sold in the first day (through a Popular Eletcronics cover story) than the company expected to sell during the entire lifetime of the product. Roberts point out that the Altair increased the installed base of computers by 1% each month during 1975-76. The company was eventually superceded by other, more powerful and felxible computers.</p>