History Of The Microcomputer Revolution
In January 1975, Popular
Electronics magazine's cover featured a picture of the Altair 8800
computer - the world's first microcomputer which used the new
Intel 8080 processor - sold mail order by a tiny company in
Albuquerque,
New Mexico. This company's name was
MITS - which stood for Model Instrumentation Telemetry Systems - and
its owner was a fellow named Ed Roberts who had
previously written some articles for the magazine.
Ed Roberts' company built electronic equipment, but
his company had fallen onto hard times and was a 1/4 million dollars in debt to
his bank. His company had sold electronics kits, calculators and the like , but
he realized that the new Intel chip
could have the capability to be used in an actual computer. Faced with looming
financial ruin, Roberts decided he would make a last ditch attempt to save his
business by selling a complete computer in kit form, based on the new
Intel 8080. He contacted
Popular Electronics magazine, and they agreed to do the cover story on
it. Roberts didn't even have a name for his computer. He asked his daughter
what would be a good high-tech sounding name, and she suggested Altair - which
was the name of a star in the popular tv series Star Trek.
Through shrewd negotiations, he was able to offer the kit for $ 397.
Intel agreed to sell him cosmetically blemished chips for $ 75 each,
instead of the going price of $ 360. This price was somewhat of an in-house
joke at Intel, because they decided
to price their new microprocessors at $360 to poke fun at the
IBM 360 Mainframe computers, which cost millions of dollars.
Roberts estimated if he got lucky he would sell enough computer kits to keep
his business afloat while he looked for other revenue sources, possibly 200
kits in a year. Like many things which have happened in the microcomputer
industry since, he had absolutely no idea what impact his computer kit would
have on the future of the world. Once the article appeared, the phones started
ringing, and Ed Roberts and the rest of the world
was soon amazed at how many people wanted to have their own computer. Things
never settled down - in one day they sold 200 computers over the phone. People
sent checks in sight unseen - completely on the faith they would some day
receive their kit in the mail.
MITS's cash flow flip-flopped virtually over night - and over time they
would receive thousands of orders for the Altair 8800. Some fanatics even drove
to Albuquerque and camped out in the
parking lot to wait for their kits.
And what were people waiting for? Quite literally for a computer in absolutely
completely disassembled bare bones kit form. To build this thing you'd have to
be an electronics technician - it would take hundreds of hours - and after it
was built it only had 256 characters of memory, no keyboard, no monitor, no
permanent memory, and then you had to be a computer programmer to program it in
machine language; zeros and ones. What could you do with it ? Hardly anything.
But it was a real computer; a personal computer that people could own - and
they loved it.
You see, people looked past the limitations of this first computer kit, and
realized that someday things would get a lot better. Ed
Roberts realized the limitations of his kit, and worked hard at
creating other peripherals which would make the Altair a more usable computer.
This included making boards with more memory, the capability to hook it up to a
teletypewriter, and the ability to store programs permanently on paper
tape, and hopefully on cassettes and maybe even floppy disks. But he and the
others knew that software - not hardware - was the solution to making things
really better. With usable software, people could write their own programs to
do really useful things.
Roberts was already aware that the
Intel 8080 had the power to run Basic - the computer language that had
been invented at Dartmouth college and which was now in the public domain.
Basic was easy to learn, and then people could really start getting some use
out of their computers. The problem was - there was no Basic language available
anywhere for the newly invented
Intel 8080. But one day Ed Roberts got a
letter from a company which said they had already created a version of Basic
which would run on the
Intel 8080, and next week we'll get back to
learning more about the Washington State connection in the microcomputer
revolution.
For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney
Copyright © 1995 MTA Micro Technology Associates
Frank Delaney
928 E. Thurston Spokane, WA 99203 (509) 624-7286/7230
Raw Bytes Computer News - KPBX FM 91.1 National Public Radio
Next Segment |
Previous Segment | Table of Contents
Copyright © 1997-2006 William Thomas Sanderson.
Portions Copyright © 1995 MTA Micro Technology Associates
Frank Delaney
All Rights Reserved.
Free counters provided by Andale.
Page ID: $Workfile: mits0020.asp $ $Revision: 1.2 $ $Last Updated:
03/12/04 05:43:00 PM
$