Altair 8800

computer An Intel 8080-based machine made by MITS. The

Altair was the first popular microcomputer kit.

It appeared on the cover of the January 1975 "Popular

Electronics" magazine with an article (probably) by Leslie

Solomon. Leslie Solomon was an editor at Popular Electronics

who had a knack for spotting kits that would interest people

and make them buy the magazine. The Altair 8800 was one such.

The MITS guys took the prototype Altair to New York to show

Solomon, but couldn't get it to work after the flight.

Nonetheless, he liked it, and it appeared on the cover as "The

first minicomputer in a kit."

Solomon's blessing was important enough that some MITS

competitors named their product the "SOL" to gain his favour.

Some wags suggested SOL was actually an abbreviation for the

condition in which kit purchasers would find themselves.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw the article on the Altair 8800

in Popular Electronics. They realized that the Altair, which

was programmed via its binary front panel needed a high levellanguage. Legend has it that they called MITS with the claim

that they had a BASIC interpreter for the Altair. When

MITS asked them to demo it in Albuquerque, they wrote one on

the plane. On arrival, they entered the machine code via the

front panel and demonstrated and sold their "product." Thus

was born "Altair BASIC."

The original Altair BASIC ran in less than 4K of RAM because a

"loaded" Altair had 4K memory. Since there was no operatingsystem on the Altair, Altair BASIC included what we now think

of as BIOS. It was distributed on paper tape that could

be read on a Teletype. Later versions supported the 8K

Altair and the 16K diskette-based Altair (demonstrating

that, even in the 1970s, Microsoft was committed to

software bloat). Altair BASIC was ported to the Motorola6800 for the Altair 680 machine, and to other 8080-based

microcomputers produced by MITS' competitors.

PC-History.org Altair 8800 page.

[Forrest M. Mimms, article in "Computers and Electronics",

(formerly "Popular Electronics"), Jan 1985(?)].

[Was there ever an "Altair 9000" microcomputer?]

(2002-06-17)