MITS: Altair 8800

Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS) produced its first ever computer, the Altair 8800 in 1975. Featured in ‘Popular Electronics’ magazine that year, many believe the Altair 8800 was the first personal computer to be mass produced.

When production began, Altair was not sold as an assembled unit but only as a kit that took a few days of hard work to solder and assemble into a fully functional computer. A tiny mistake here or there meant your $395 went down the drain.

Altair 8800 had an Intel 8080 CPU that held 2 MHz of processing power. It had a RAM of 256 bytes that could be expanded to as much as 64KB. Its operating system was called ‘Altair Basic’. This software was developed by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the duo that eventually went on to Microsoft fame. ‘Altair Basic’ was Microsoft’s first commercial product.

An interesting fact about Altair 8800 was that it required no monitor or keyboard. In order to use it, you had to flip switches present on the face of the device (front panel) and the sequence was used as code for the program. LED’s on the face of the device would light up as a sign of commands being ‘understood’.

Thanks to dozens of S-100 cards that were later available, different hardware could be added to Altair; such as monitor, keyboard, printer and data storage.

Some examples of S-100 cards include:

CPU
Memory extension
Video Card
Printer Port
Serial Interface
Floppy Disk Controller

Altair was certainly a gate to the true computer age that came thereafter. Produced almost four decades ago, finding an Altair 8800 is surely a rare piece of technological history.