Concept
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics and was sold by mail order through advertisements there, in Radio-Electronics, and in other hobbyist magazines. According to Harry Garland, the Altair 8800 was the product that catalyzed the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. It was the first commercially successful personal computer. 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 Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC. While serving at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, Ed Roberts and Forrest M. Mims III decided to use their electronics background to produce small kits for model rocket hobbyists. In 1969, Roberts and Mims, along with Stan Cagle and Robert Zaller, founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in Roberts' garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and started selling radio transmitters and instruments for model rockets. The model rocket kits were a modest success and MITS wanted to try a kit that would appeal to more hobbyists. The November 1970 issue of Popular Electronics featured the Opticom, a kit from MITS that would send voice over an LED light beam. As Mims and Cagle were losing interest in the kit business, Roberts bought his partners out, then began developing a calculator kit. Electronic Arrays had just announced the EAS100, a set of six large scale integrated (LSI) circuit chips that would make a four-function calculator. The MITS 816 calculator kit used the chipset and was featured on the November 1971 cover of Popular Electronics. This calculator kit sold for , or $275 assembled. Forrest Mims wrote the assembly manual for this kit and many others over the next several years. As payment for each manual he often accepted a copy of the kit. The calculator was successful and was followed by several improved models.
