1974 MITS Altair 8800
The MITS Altair 8800 is a personal computer designed in 1975, based on the Intel 8080 CPU.
Originally sold as a kit through the US magazine Popular Electronics, the designers were aiming to sell just a few hundred units, and were surprised when they sold 10 times what they had forecast for the first month. Today the Altair is recognized as the spark that led to the personal computer revolution in the following years: computer buses designed for the Altair would become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus and the first programming language for the machine was Altair BASIC, which led to the founding of Microsoft.
| INTRODUCED: | January 1975 |
| AVAILABLE: | February 1975 |
| PRICES: | US $395 as a kit |
| (prior to March) | US $650 assembled |
| HOW MANY: | estimated 2000+ |
| CPU: | Intel 8080, 2.0 MHz |
| RAM: | 256 bytes, 64K max |
| DISPLAY: | front panel LEDs |
| CONTROLS: | front panel switches |
| EXPANSION: | Altair-bus card-cage |
| STORAGE: | paper tape, cassette or |
| floppy drive | |
| OS: | CP/M, BASIC |
| Additional Altair cards available from MITS: | ||
| Function | kit price | assembled |
| 1K static RAM | $97 | $139 |
| 2K static RAM | $145 | $195 |
| 4K dynamic RAM | $195 | $275 |
| Serial interface (Rs232) | $119 | $139 |
| Serial interface (Teletype) | $124 | $146 |
| Parallel interface | $92 | $114 |
| Cassette interface | $128 | $175 |
| Teletype Model 33 ASR | N.A. | $1500 |
Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw an opportunity and wrote Altair BASIC, a true programming language. Monte Davidoff contributed maths routines, including the floating-point routines for Altair 4K BASIC. Altair BASIC was very expensive at $500, but only $75 when purchased with an Altair computer, an interface board, and 8K of memory.
Soon after, Gates and Allen formed their own company – Micro-Soft, and sold Altair BASIC as their first product.
Filed under: 70s Computers - @ January 30, 2022 8:10 PM