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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.
By August 1975, they had shipped over 5,000 computers. [33] 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]
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 ...
David Hugh Bunnell (July 25, 1947 – October 18, 2016) was a pioneer of the personal computing industry who founded some of the most successful computer magazines including PC Magazine, PC World, and Macworld. In 1975, he was working at MITS in Albuquerque, N.M., when the company made the first personal computer, the Altair 8800.
The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE 696-1983 (inactive-withdrawn), is an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800.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.
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.
The development of the single-chip microprocessor was an enormous catalyst to the popularization of cheap, easy to use, and truly personal computers. The Altair 8800, introduced in a Popular Electronics magazine article in the January 1975 issue, at the time set a new low price point for a computer, bringing computer ownership to an admittedly ...
The Altair 8800, which began the personal computer revolution, was introduced in January 1975 with no hardware or software support for floppy disk or hard disk storage.. When Paul Allen travelled to the MITS factory in Albuquerque, New Mexico to demonstrate what would become Microsoft BASIC, he brought with him a punched paper tape of the code that he and Bill Gates had develo