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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.
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. The introduction of three computers aimed at personal users in 1977, the Radio Shack TRS-80 , Apple II , and Commodore PET , significantly changed the American microcomputer market ...
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]
The Altair 8800 computer was a break-even sale for MITS. They needed to sell additional memory boards, I/O boards, and other options to make a profit. The April 1975 issue of the MITS newsletter Computer Notes had a page-long price list that offered over 15 optional boards. [ 34 ]
The MITS Altair 8800, the first commercially successful hobby computer, is released. An article in Popular Electronics (January 1975), described the computer and invited people to order kits. Despite the limited processing power, input/output system ( blinkenlights and toggle switches) and memory (256 bytes), around 200 were ordered on the ...
On display are key items from the early era of computers (and even before) from ageing comptometers through the Altair 8800 to the ZX Spectrum and Apple II. The museum also holds vintage games consoles, peripherals, software and an extensive collection of computer manuals, magazines and other literature. It is home to the Megaprocessor, an ...
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.
The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE 696-1983 (inactive-withdrawn), is an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800.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.