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The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE 696-1983 (inactive-withdrawn), is an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800.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.
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. [2] It was the first commercially successful personal computer. [ 3 ]
The 8080 was used in many early microcomputers, such as the MITS Altair 8800 Computer, Processor Technology SOL-20 Terminal Computer and IMSAI 8080 Microcomputer, forming the basis for machines running the CP/M operating system (the later, almost fully compatible and more able, Zilog Z80 processor would capitalize on this, with Z80 and CP/M ...
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 ...
Intel had announced the 8080 chip, and compared to the 4004 to which IMS Associates had been first introduced, it looked like a "real computer". Full-scale development of the IMSAI 8080 was put into action using the existing Altair 8800's S-100 bus, and by October 1975 an ad was placed in Popular Electronics, receiving positive reactions. [5]
The Bytesaver, introduced by Cromemco in 1976, was the first programmable memory board for the MITS Altair and S-100 bus microcomputer systems. The Bytesaver had sockets for 8 UV-erasable EPROMs providing up to 8 Kbytes of storage. The EPROMs could be programmed by the Bytesaver, or read as computer memory.
Roberts and Yates got to work on building a replacement. The computer on the magazine cover was an empty box with just switches and LEDs on the front panel. The finished Altair computer had a completely different circuit board layout than the prototype shown in the magazine. [27] Altair 8800 Computer with 8-inch floppy disk system
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.