The MITS Altair 8800 is considered by many to be the first “personal computer.” The Altair was designed by Ed Roberts, the owner and president of Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS), in 1974 and sold as a kit for the cost of $439. The core of Altair was the use of the Intel 8080 microprocessor. The 8080 normally sold for over $300 each but Roberts was able to acquire cosmetically blemished versions of 8080 for $75 each in large volumes. These versions worked just as well as the more expensive ones, allowing the Altair 8800 to be released at a more affordable price. At first the popularity of Altair was limited. This all changed with the release of the January1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. Within a month orders for the Altair jump dramatically. MITS couldn’t keep up with demand and some buyers camped in the company’s car park waiting for their machines.
While in 1975 the Altair was considered cutting edge, by today’s standard, the Altair was limited. The 8080 microprocessors ran at a clock speed of only 2MHz. The unit shipped with only 256 bytes of RAM but was expandable to 64K bytes. Storage was punched paper tape, cassette tape or as show here 8-inch floppy drive. When first released, programming and data input/output on the Altair was via the many switches and LEDs on the front panel.