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The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. [2] Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics [3] and was sold by mail order through advertisements there, in Radio-Electronics, and in other hobbyist magazines.
A number of complete microcomputers were offered even before kits became popular, dating to as far back as 1972. For some time there was a major market for assembled versions of the Altair 8800, a market that grew significantly through the late 1970s and into the early 1980s.
An Altair 8800 kit with 8 KB of memory and Altair BASIC cost only $995 in August 1975. In December 1974 Bill Gates was a student at Harvard University and Paul Allen worked for Honeywell in Boston. They saw the Altair 8800 computer in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics and knew it was powerful enough to support a BASIC interpreter. [66]
Altair BASIC is a discontinued interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product (as Micro-Soft), distributed by MITS under a contract. Altair BASIC was the start of the Microsoft BASIC product range.
The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE 696-1983 (inactive-withdrawn), is an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800. The S-100 bus was the first industry standard expansion bus for the microcomputer industry. S-100 computers, consisting of processor and peripheral cards, were produced by a number of manufacturers.
This was released by MITS in punch tape format for the Altair 8800 shortly after the machine itself, [7] showcasing BASIC as the primary language for early microcomputers. In March 1975, Steve Wozniak attended the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club and began formulating the design of his own computer. Club members were excited by ...
Parasitic Engineering, Inc., was an American computer company founded by Howard Fullmer and Gene Nardi in 1974.Named as a tongue-in-cheek reference to a comment by MITS co-founder Ed Roberts, Parasitic's first products were hardware upgrade kits to MITS' Altair 8800 microcomputer kit, improving the latter's power supply rating and susceptibility to noise.
As supplied, the Altair 8800 could only be programmed via front-panel switches and lights. A cost-effective terminal was lacking. January 1975 was also the month that the Altair 8800 appeared on the front page of Popular Electronics, sparking off intense interest among the engineers of the rapidly growing Silicon Valley.