How are you currently reading this essay? Perhaps on a Laptop, maybe you are sitting at your desk, or even using your phone. Whatever method you are using, it is a result of the impact the Altair 8800 computer had. In 1975, this computer made its mark on the computing world by being one of the first personal computers, and being very powerful for the price. Not only did it contribute to some of the most revolutionary computer pioneers, examples being Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Wozniak, but it also kick-started the personal computer revolution itself. As we look back on it in our modern age, this computer might seem rudimentary. Your fridge probably has more computing power than it, but its contribution into getting us to this point can not be understated. The story of the Altair is an incredibly intriguing and rich one, starting from its creation by MITS in the face of financial difficulty, its announcement in Popular Electronics and instant success, how the computer functioned, all the way to its impact by starting the personal computer revolution through jump-starting Microsoft and inspiring a generation of new programmers and computer hobbyists.
To fully understand this story, we must first examine how it starts. The Altair 8800 begins with Edward Roberts, a young engineer working at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. Jeffrey Young writes in his book Forbes Greatest Technology Stories that: “In the late 1960’s, [Edward Roberts] was assigned to the Air Force Weapons Lab at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque” (Young 150). Edward’s passion was in electronics however, and he often spent his free time on the base with the other engineers constructing telemetry systems for model rockets: “Roberts and the other young engineers at the base built radio-controlled rocket systems” (Young 150). It was in this hobby that the company MITS was formed. MITS was originally created by Edward for the purpose of selling these telemetry systems, however the company had to pivot with the realization that there was not much profit to be made in the model rocket systems market: “By 1970, they called it quits when they saw there was not much of a market for toy rocket controllers” (Young 151). So where did Roberts decide to take the company? At this point in the early 1970’s, a new market for small electronic calculators was becoming incredibly large. Edward saw this, and decided to produce and sell his own calculator kit. This calculator, the MITS 816, would be MIT’s first huge success. A large part of its success was the fact that, using new at the time integrated circuit technology, the price was incredibly cheap: “The calculator cost Roberts just over $100; he sold it to customers for $179 in kit form” (Young 152). When the calculator was released in 1971, the nearest competitor calculator cost $1200, thereby giving Edward a huge advantage in the market (Young 152). However this success would not last forever, as the falling price of calculators and other large electronics companies entering the new market proved to be detrimental. MITS was close to bankruptcy and Edward was in debt, this is when he came up with the idea of a customizable microcomputer based on the new Intel 8080 microprocessor: “MITS shares dropped from $1 to as low as 40 cents, when he finally seized on an idea: building a small programmable computer out of cheap IC parts” (Young 155). This computer would be the Altair 8800. The story of the Altair is the story of MITS, and Edward’s drive to keep the company afloat by getting an edge on the next big market.
Now that Edward completed the designs for the Altair 8800, the next step in this story was publication. Popular Electronics was an electronics magazine that was extremely popular with the electronics hobbyist community in the early 70’s. Edward already had a relationship with the magazine, in fact the MITS 816 calculator was previously featured in it. This time, the magazine was looking for something bigger. In 1974, a minicomputer called the Mark-8 based on the older Intel 8008 processor was announced in a competing magazine named Radio Electronics. This motivated Popular Electronics to find their own computer to show off, as Sinclair Target puts it in his computer history blog Two-bit History: “The Mark-8’s appearance in Radio Electronics pushed Popular Electronics to look for a minicomputer project of their own to feature” (Sinclair). So when Edward came to the magazine looking to feature his machine, the magazine obliged and planned to feature it in the January 1975 issue. He was able to convince the editor at Popular Electronics to put his computer on the front page, even though Altair 8800 had not been finalized yet. Leading up to January however, Popular Electronics continually checked if there was any competition creating a similar product: “So every month they checked the competition, to be sure no one else had anything like this in the works” (Young 157). The article was finally published, and the electronics world had their first look at this new machine. The article in Popular Electronics, showing off an image of a mocked-up prototype of the front-panel and written by Edward Robers himself, proudly proclaimed that: “The era of the computer in every home-a favorite topic among science -fiction writers-has arrived!” (Edward et. al.). Just as with the release of the MITS 816 calculator, the Altair was an instant success, “As soon as the January issue hit the stand, MITS was inundated with orders. It was an even bigger explosion than they experienced with the calculator” (Young 158). The computer was also extremely cheap for the time, priced at $400. The publication of the Altair was so momentous because: “…never before had such a fully capable computer been offered to the public at an affordable price” (Sinclair), however it was also an instant success for Edward, as it had saved his company.
To understand more about how the Altair 8800 was important, we must look at how it functions. The Altair came in kit form, which means it did not come with anything other than the computer itself. No terminal, keyboard, or any software. The only method to input programs was the front panel, where you would manually set a binary digit by flicking the switches and enter it into memory: “The front panel had a row of 16 switches that could be used to set an address and a lower row of eight switches that could be used to control the operation of the computer” (Sinclair). Why eight switches for each instruction? Charles Pezold writes in his book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software that the Intel 8080 is an: “8-bit microprocessor that reads data from memory and writes data to memory 8 bits at a time” (Petzold 262), Meaning that each instruction for the processor could only be eight bits long. Entering values through the front panel is how you gave instructions to the heart of the computer, the Intel 8080 processor. According to the official manual for the Altair, the computer has: “78 basic machine language instructions” (“Altair 8800 Operator’s Manual”), and these are all the instructions you could use to program the Intel 8080 CPU. Programming on the Altair 8800 was a laborious process, as depending on the size of your program, it could take minutes to manually enter each binary instruction. Now that we have a basic understanding of how this computer functions, exactly what kind of impact did it have?
The impact the Altair 8800 had on the electronics world can not be understated. Computer science professor Len Shustek from the Computer History Museum describes that the Altair kick-started the first homebrew computer club meeting in the California bay-area: “The reason for having the meeting was that People’s Computer Company had been sent a review copy of the Altair 8800” (Plutte et al. 1:12). The club was directly founded as a result of the Altair 8800’s release, and it would be this same club where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak would show their Apple I computer. Needless to say, Apple would later have a huge impact on the personal computing world over the next few decades and beyond to our modern day. The Altair was also how Microsoft got its start, as Microsoft was originally founded to create software for the Altair 8800. Their first product would be a BASIC language interpreter for the machine, which they presented to MITS in order to sell it alongside the Altair. Mary Bellis, writer at ThoughtCo, explains: “After eight weeks, Allen and Gates demonstrated their program to MITS, which agreed to distribute and market the product under the name Altair BASIC” (Bellies). In an interesting twist that may not be so surprising, Bill Gates was not a fan of how homebrew computer club members distributed his software amongst themselves. The Microsoft BASIC interpreter was supposed to be purchased for $500 from MITS: “Not everyone was pleased with the fact that we were distributing software in the homebrew computer club that we perhaps didn’t have the right to. One of those people who was displeased was Bill Gates” (Jon Plutte et al. 3:12). The Altair 8800 gave way to two of the most influential computer companies in history, Apple and Microsoft. With that, ends the story of this game-changing computer.
To conclude this chapter in computing history, the Altair 8800’s story began with Edward and the creation of MITS as purely a way to monetize his hobby of constructing model rocket telemetry systems. Edward used his prior relationship with Popular Electronics to guarantee himself a prime spot, and it most definitely paid off. The computer worked in a way that might seem foreign in these modern times, but it was revolutionary because of its capability for the price. The impact it left was extremely important in starting innovative companies like Microsoft and Apple, as well as the broader computer scene. This is the reason why the Altair 8800’s impact is allowing you to read this essay, on the computer that owes its existence to the Altair, at least partially.
Works Cited
“Altair 8800 Operator’s Manual,” MITS Inc, Albuquerque, 1975, http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/altair/d/88opman.pdf
Bellies, Mary, “A Short History of Microsoft,” ThoughtCo.com, ThoughtCo, 10 Jan. 2020, https://www.thoughtco.com/microsoft-history-of-a-computing-giant-1991140
Edward, Roberts et al. “ALTAIR 8800: The most powerful minicomputer project ever presented can be built for under $400,” Popular Electronics, Jan. 1975, pp. 33–38, https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/70s/1975/Poptronics-1975-01.pdf
Petzold, Charles, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, Redmond, Microsoft Publishing, 2000
Plutte, Jon et al. “Len Shustek, Lee Felsenstein: The Homebrew Computer Club,” Computer History Musuem, 2011, https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/personal-computers/17/312/2311
Target, Sinclair. “Dawn of the Microcomputer: The Altair 8800,” Two-Bit History, 22 Jul. 2018, https://twobithistory.org/2018/07/22/dawn-of-the-microcomputer.html#fn:3
Young, Jeffery. Forbes Greatest Technology Stories, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1998, https://archive.org/details/forbesgreatest00youn