An Air Force trained engineer who had designed electronics for Christmas window displays, Henry Edward "Ed" Roberts and a colleague in 1969 founded MITS Inc., in Albuquerque, N.M. The company's name was an acronym for Micro Telemetry Instrumentation Systems; it initially built equipment for model-rocketry hobbyists.
With several years of experience producing electronics kits for hobbyists, Ed Roberts decided to design a small, affordable computer with the Intel 8080 microprocessor at its core. He called it Altair 8800. His daughter suggested the name based on a star that had also featured as a destination in a Star Trek episode.
The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured on its cover a box with switches and blinking lights called the Altair 8800, considered by many to be the first personal computer.
Ed Roberts intended to sell only a few hundred to hobbyists, but he was surprised when he sold thousands in the first month. The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Micro-Soft's founding product—Altair BASIC.
The Altair garnered 5,000 orders in its first year, with the base model selling for $397.
Some of the first software that was created for the Altair 8800 was a BASIC interpreter created by Paul Allen and Bill Gates, while they were working for MITS.
Altair 8800: The start of microcomputer revolution
