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Altair 8800, from Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS) of Albuquerque

The Altair 8800, from Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS) of Albuquerque, NM, was first featured in the January 1975 edition of Popular Electronics. It is considered by many to be the first mass produced personal computer, although they were called micro-computers in those days.

The Altair was initially offered only as a kit - it took many days and nights of careful soldering and assembly to hopefully create a working Altair. Only true hackers would undertake such an endeavor.

The Altair is comprised of a case, a power supply, a front panel and a passive motherboard with 16 expansion slots. All of the circuitry - the CPU and memory, are on cards which plug into the expansion slots, which MITS called the Altair bus.

This became a very popular method of making computers, and the Altair bus became an industry standard, but MITS didn't appreciate it being renamed as the S-100 bus. Numerous computers from other manufacturers were designed around the S-100 bus - the IMSAI 8800 was the first - the first computer clone.

Since no keyboard or monitor was necessary, or cheaply available, users flipped switches on the front panel, writing their own programs in machine language, and watching the LEDs on the panel light up in response to their commands. Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw an opportunity and wrote Altair BASIC, a true programming language, and the first commercial Microsoft computer product.

Due to the unlimited variety of S-100 cards soon available, a keyboard, TTY, monitor, printer and data storage can all be added to increase the Altair's usefulness.