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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.
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.
It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first version of BASIC published by Microsoft as well as the first high-level programming language available for the Altair 8800 microcomputer. During the home computer craze of the late-1970s and early-1980s, BASIC was ported to and supplied with many home computer designs.
Machines were sold in small numbers, with final assembly by the user. Kits took advantage of this by offering the system at a low price point. Kits were popular, beginning in 1975, with the introduction of the famous Altair 8800, but as sales volumes increased, kits became less common.
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]
It is a clone of its main competitor, the earlier MITS Altair 8800. The IMSAI is largely regarded as the first "clone" microcomputer. The IMSAI machine runs a highly modified version of the CP/M operating system called IMDOS. It was developed, manufactured and sold by IMS Associates, Inc. (later renamed to IMSAI Manufacturing Corp). In total ...
Saga of a System - David Ahl's story of how he got his Altair 8800/Dazzler system built, includes some sample images; Cromemco Dazzler - image of the original design and its instruction manual; Build the TV Dazzler - original Popular Electronics article - Vintage Computer Federation recreation
The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE 696-1983 (inactive-withdrawn), is an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800.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.