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General
In
January 1975 the birth of a special case takes place. The announcement
on a front-page of a hackers magazine: Popular Electronics.
The
parent of this baby are MITS inc. and we call him Altair 8800. It
is 18" x 17" 7 high and weighs the tremendous amount of
256 bytes ( that is a quarter K).It is said that this is the worlds
first mini computer to rival commercial models. The Altair 8800 has
a Intel 8080 CPU and is sold for 395 U$ or when you want it assembled
498 U$.
Description
The Popular
Electronics article is exaggerating enormously with the description
of the Altair 8800
"a
full-blown computer that can hold its own against sophisticated minicomputers
now on the market... The Altair 8800 is not a 'demonstrator' or souped-up
calculator... [it] is a complete system."
The article has a text box that sums some of the specifications and
state the the Altair is so powerful it could run in a kind of multi
tasking mode.
For example an automatic controller for a 27Mc station, a brain for
a robot, a pattern recognition machine, and a print to Braille conversion
for blind people.(1)
Many of these things will only be possible over two decades later.
Indeed it was a bit over done by the editors of Popular Electronics.
But it can be seen in the light of their enthusiasm of the idea that
everybody could possess their own computer. This with a computer with
only 256 bits, no keyboard, monitor, or data storage on tape or diskettes,
were included. Let alone you could pay for that.(2)
De Altair is a do it your self kit and it can be post ordered for
less than 500 U$. For this time incredible cheap. Especially when
you know that the contemporary computers are the "Big Irons".
Extremely expensive and extremely big. Only big and rich companies
can afford to buy one.
MITS hoped to get about 400 orders during the two months the two part
article would run in Popular Electronics. Like that MITS would be
able to get the money to buy the parts it needed to build the machine.
Quit a normal way to start up small businesses in this days. And it
would give MITS the opportunity to build an assembly line for packing
the kits.
But they
under estimated the burning wanting of the Popular Electronic readers
to have their own computer en have it running. MITS receives
the expected 400 orders in one afternoon, in three weeks about 250.000!
The unit is sold for US$ 375 with kb memory.
Chronology
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