History

The company Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) was founded in the American city of Albuquerque in 1969, by Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims. Roberts started designing the Altair around 1974 and the computer was officially released on January 19, 1975. In that same month, the Altair 8800 was featured on the cover of the Popular Electronics magazine and interest in the product grew rapidly. This computer was sold primarily through magazines, such as Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist publications. Around 25,000 computers were sold, up until MITS was sold to the company Pertec Computer in 1977. Even though the Altair 8800 was replaced quite quickly by other systems, it should still be considered as an important entry in the history of the home computer.

System

Programming with the system was done simply with the different switches on the front panel. The information entered and the command status would be displayed by the processor via the LED lights. This was the only standard outputsystem bundled with the Altair 8800. However, it was possible to expand the system via cards that would be placed on the system bus. There were multiple available cards, including: a punch card reader for storage, extra RAM cards and a RS-232 connection which enabled the Altair to connect to a Teletype monitor.

The bus which the Altair operated on, the S-100, later became the de facto standard within the computer industry and would become officially recognized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).