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| | Altair 8800 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
 | | The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975, based on the Intel 8080A CPU. | | | Today the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that led to the personal computer revolution of the next few years: The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC. | | | Programming the Altair was an extremely tedious process where one toggled the switches to positions corresponding to an 8080 opcode, then used a special switch to enter the code into the machine's memory, and then repeated this step until all the opcodes of a presumably complete and correct program was in place. |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800
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| | Floppy Disk Drive |
| | The Altair Floppy Disk System is a mass memory storage system designed by MITS engineers exclusively for the Altair 8800 series microcomputers. | | | Altair Disk Extended BASIC provides the Altair 8800 series microcomputers with complete facility for reading or writing data files and for saving and loading program files. | | | The Altair Disk format allows storage of over 300,000 bytes of memory on each diskette. |
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http://rwebs.net/micros/altair/1976Brochure/disk.htm
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| | MSN Encarta - Search Results - Altair 8800 |
| | Altair 8800, a small computer introduced in 1975 by Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems of New Mexico. | | | MSN Encarta - Search Results - Altair 8800 | | | Also known as Alpha Aquilae, Altair is a... |
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http://uk.encarta.msn.com/Altair_8800.html
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| | HistoryWired: A few of our favorite things |
| | The designation "8800" referred to the fact that the computer used the new Intel 8080 chip. | | | The Altair was a "hobbyist" computer because customers had to construct the machine from a kit. | | | As sold, the Altair was programmed in direct binary code, using the toggle switches on the front panel to enter one's and zero's. |
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http://historywired.si.edu/object.cfm?ID=339
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| | The IMSAI 8800 |
| | The front panel of the Altair used small toggle switches to program the computer in binary machine language (ones and zeros were represented by switches "on" or "off".) The Imsai used the same arrangement but replaced the Altair's toggle switches with heavy commercial-grade "paddle" switches. | | | Although the MITS Altair 8800 was the first practical personal microcomputer and started the industry, credit for spreading the personal computer revolution must go to another company_IMS Associates and its product, the Imsai 8080 computer. | | | IBM had developed the floppy disk to load software, and Altair, Imsai, and other companies were working to adapt it for use on microcomputers. |
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http://www.pc-history.org/imsai.htm
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| | MITS Altair 8800 computer |
| | Numerous computers from other manufacturers were designed around the S-100 bus - the IMSAI 8800 was the first - the first computer clone. | | | The Altair 8800, from Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS) of Albuquerque, NM, was first featured in the January 1975 edition of Popular Electronics. | | | 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. |
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http://oldcomputers.net/altair.html
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| | Computers Hardware Historical Altair 8800 |
| | MITS Altair 8800 - Considered by many to be the first microcomputer, the MITS altair 8800 was based on a 2 MHz Intel 8080 with 256 bytes standard RAM and interfaced with the user through the octal front panel switches. | | | The SIMH Altair 8800 Z80 simulator - Altair emulator for PC and Mac. | | | This unit has an 8" floppy disk drive. |
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http://www.iper1.com/iper1-odp/scat/id/Computers/Hardware/Historical/Altair_8800
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| | fUSION Anomaly. Altair 8800 |
| | Although it was short-lived, the Altair is considered the first successful personal computer, which were then called home computers. | | | The January edition of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800 computer kit, based on Intel's 8080 microprocessor, on its cover. | | | Ed Roberts invented the 8800 -- which sold for $297, or $395 with a case -- and coined the term "personal computer." The machine came with 256 bytes of memory (expandable to 64K) and an open 100-line bus structure that |
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http://fusionanomaly.net/altair8800.html
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| | The MITS Altair |
| | The Altair was not the first personal computer. | | | The MITS Altair is perhaps the most famous early computer. | | | The Altair did not start the computer hobbyist movement. |
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http://www.blinkenlights.com/altair.shtml
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| | System Source - Computer Museum |
| | Considered by many to be the first microcomputer, the MITS altair 8800 was based on a 2 MHz Intel 8080 with 256 bytes standard RAM and interfaced with the user through the octal front panel switches. | | | It was the Altair 8800, on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics, that really set off the (personal computer) boom. | | | The first Altairs came with only 256 bytes of memory; they also lacked output devices such as printers. |
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http://www.syssrc.com/html/museum/html/altair.html
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| | Personal Computer Milestones |
| | The Altair, introduced in January 1975, was the first computer to be produced in fairly high quantity, and it was the first computer to run Microsoft software, but we're not sure that's a good thing. | | | Like the Altair, it was available from the manufacturer both as a kit and as a pre-assembled computer. | | | Unfortunately for computer history buffs, the Altair is often mistakenly called the first personal computer by Microsoft-loving journalists who don't know any better. |
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http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml
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| | Altair - a Whatis.com definition |
| | The Altair was the world's first personal computer (PC) to attract a substantial number of users. | | | The Smithsonian has more information about the Altair in their Computer History Collection. | | | However, this is where the "hobby" aspect came into play: people tinkered with their kits and eventually got their systems to (more or less) work, a situation that is still familiar to many computer component purchasers today. |
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http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/gDefinition/0,294236,sid1_gci927695,00.html?track=NL-118&ad=477726&offer=m.4.04
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| | Altair32 Emulator Project main page |
| | Claus, a programmer working for Microsoft, wrote a 16-bit Windows-based "emulator" for the Altair and IMSAI 8080-based computers. | | | For the longest time, I was only able to find the binary distribution, but no source code. | | | In 1999, I downloaded a copy of a MITS Altair emulator program written for the Windows platform by Claus Giloi. |
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http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp/Altair32.htm
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| | Happy 30th birthday, PC! - bargainshare.com |
| | Many however consider the Altair 8800, introduced in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, as the first Personal Computer and ancestor of the IBM PC. | | | The Altair 8800 included Intel& 8080 processor, a memory for 65,000 words, 65,000 subroutine levels, and up to 181 available machine instructions. | | | The Altair 8800 shows little similarity with today's computers and came without monitor, keyboard or disc storage. |
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http://www.bargainshare.com/index.php?showtopic=51166
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| | NMAH: Altair 8800 Microcomputer |
| | MITS succeeded where other, more established firms had failed, and it was their machine that inaugurated the personal computer age. | | | Not long after Intel introduced its 8080 chip, a small firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, named MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) announced a computer kit called the Altair, which met the social as well as technical requirements for a small personal computer. | | | In January 1975, a photograph of the Altair appeared on the cover of the magazine Popular Electronics. |
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http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=29
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| | MITS Altair 8800 Simulator Configuration |
| | The MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) Altair 8800 was announced on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics, which boasted you could buy and build this powerful computer kit for only $397. | | | But the computer was an open system, and by 1977 MITS and many other small startups had added many expansion cards to make the Altair quite a respectable little computer. | | | The updated version with a Z80 CPU was developed by Peter Schorn. |
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http://simh.trailing-edge.com/altair.html
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| | MITS/Pertec Altair 8800/680b/MITS 300 |
| | The Altair pictured on the cover of the magazine is actually a mock-up, as an actual computer was not available, Railway Express loses Ed Robert's only prototype Altair computer, en route to New York for review and photography for publishing by Popular Electronics. | | | In december 1974, Popular Electronics publishes an article by MITS announcing the Altair 8800 computer for | | | Pertec moved away from the "Hobbyist Computer" image of the 8800a and put the 8800b in a desk with the 3202 diskette sub-system and made the MITS 300/25 Small Business System. |
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http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/altair1.htm
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| | NMAH: Computers & Business Machines |
| | A Cray2 supercomputer is part of the collections, along with one of the towers of IBM's Deep Blue, the computer that defeated reigning champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match in 1997. | | | Other artifacts range from personal computers to ENIAC, the Altair, and the Osborne 1. | | | Not long after Intel introduced its 8080 chip, a small firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, named MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) announced a computer kit called the Altair, which... |
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http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/subject_detail.cfm?key=32&colkey=11
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| | IEEEVM: Altair, Computer in a Kit |
| | It was computer hobbyists who first built such a device, and the first hobbyist kit for a microprocessor-based computer was the Altair 8800—which used the Intel 8800 chip—offered for the first time in January 1975. | | | There was no keyboard or display; the hobbyist programmed the computer using a panel of switches and read the output from a panel of neon bulbs. | | | The computer had no keyboard and no display; it was programmed with the switches on the front panel. |
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http://www.ieee-virtual-museum.org/collection/event.php?taid=&id=3456897&lid=1
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| | The Online Software Museum |
| | On January 2nd, 1975, only days after the stunning announcement of the Altair kit computer in Popular Electronics magazine had been delivered into the hands of its eager subscribers, a letter was on its way to MITS from two Harvard students, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. | | | But this, Altair Disk Extended BASIC version 4.1, was almost all personally written by the two future tycoons. | | | It was the "high-end" of the MITS software line, "Altair Disk Extended BASIC". |
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http://museum.sysun.com/museum/althist.html
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| | Altair-8800-1974 |
| | Announced in 1974, the Altair was the first successful commercially-marketed and mass-produced personal computer. | | | The Altair 8800 was also featured in "Popular Electronics" magazine in January and February 1975. | | | MITS is known for the creation and marketing of the Altair, the first successful commercially-marketed and mass-produced personal computer |
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http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/Altair-8800-1974.htm
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| | MITS ALTAIR 8800 |
| | First, the Altair was not the first computer featured as a construction article in a national electronics magazine. | | | Second, the Altair was offered as a complete kit, not just a list of parts to buy in order to make a computer. | | | It is over 20 years since the debut of the Altair 8800 computer in the pages of Popular Electronics Magazine, but everyone connected with it tells a completely different story. |
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http://www.pc-history.org/altair.htm
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| | MITS Altair 8800 |
| | The Altair 8800 was far from the first "Personal Computer" but it was the first truly successful one. | | | I have one altair 8800 computer i wish to sell fast no resonable offers will be refused. | | | I would like to by an atair 8800 computer |
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http://www.vintage-computer.com/altair8800.shtml
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| | Untitled Document |
| | One of the most prominently displayed early computers in the exhibit is a rare pre-production model of the famous Altair 8800. | | | The Altair computer sparked the personal computing revolution when this magazine appeared on newsstands nearly three decades ago. | | | Twenty-five years ago Popular Electronics magazine featured on its cover a photograph of a build-it-yourself computer called the Altair 8800. |
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http://www.sas.org/E-Bulletin/2003-09-12/mimsfeatures/body.html
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| | The TEXTFILES.COM BBS Timeline: 1975 |
| | Compared to today's PCs, the Altair was primitive: it had 4K of static memory, 25 front panel switches for programming the computer in machine language (binary), 36 LED indicator lights to display the results of any computation and that was all. | | | Any information about solving construction problems with the Altair, software for the Altair, in short anything related to computers was in great demand. | | | There had been a kit computer offered by RadioElectronics magazine in October of 1974 boasting the Intel 8008 chip, but it lacked the far greater instruction set of the newer Intel 8080 and was a collection of stacked circuit boards and a bird's nest of cables. |
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http://timeline.textfiles.com/1975
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| | Altair32 Emulator Project - MITS History |
| | The case was painted a nifty color of "robin's egg blue", playing off of the color used by IBM in the early 70's on its mainframe computers, so as to convey that, yes, the Altair was a "real" computer. | | | Today computer users and hobbyists express amazement at the size of this kit, noting that no peripherals were available and the memory size was limited to 256 bytes. | | | However, the computer was an "open" system and within a year MITS and many other start-ups had created expansion cards (primarily through necessity because of the weak performance of the early MITS memory boards) to make the Altair a viable computing platform. |
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http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp/Altair32history.htm
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| | The Altair 8800; was it the most important personal computer ever made? |
| | Not that the Altair was anything that would be recognisable as a personal computer today. | | | The Altair 8800; was it the most important personal computer ever made? | | | On March 5, 1975 - just two months after the initial announcement of the Altair, and after just 1500 of the machines had been made, the "Homebrew Computer Club" was founded - and announced to the computer cognoscenti of San Francisco. |
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http://www.btinternet.com/~a.j.poulter/Paper.html
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| | IT Timeline |
| | The Altair 8800 let the way for personal computers. | | | The Altair paved the way for the smaller less expensive computers that would eventually end up in our classrooms and in our homes. | | | Bill Gates and Paul Allen provide the Altair with the first computer language program written for a personal computer, a rewritten version of BASIC. |
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http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/tbarcalow/C&I335/ITtimeline.htm
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| | Apple II History Chap 1 |
| | Roberts and the editor, Les Solomon, decided to call the computer the "Altair 8800"; it measured 18-inches deep by 17 inches wide by 7 inches high, and it weighed in at a massive 256 bytes (that's one fourth of a "K"). | | | The difficulty MITS had in supplying the demand for computers also led to the creation of other similar computers that used the 8080. | | | All this was promised from a computer that came "complete" with only 256 bytes of memory (expandable if you could afford it) and no keyboard, monitor, or storage device. |
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http://apple2history.org/history/ah01.html
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| | This Date in IT History December - - CIO Magazine Dec 1,2003 |
| | The Altair 8800 would become a sensation among computer enthusiasts after a January 1975 article in Popular Electronics magazine, which spurred thousands of orders in that first month. | | | The crew of the Enterprise was headed in the direction of the Altair star when Les Solomon, technical editor at Popular Mechanics, asked his 12-year-old daughter what to call the MITS computer. | | | 1974 The Altair 8800, the first PC (or microcomputer as it was known then), is available for sale on Dec. 19, from MITS, a company based in Ed Roberts' Albuquerque, N.M., garage. |
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http://www.cio.com/archive/120103/tl_date.html?printversion=yes
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| | The Online Software Museum - CP/M |
| | Altair Hardware: Information on the Altair's hardware configurations. | | | This is that BASIC, which drove the sales of the machine, as it was the only high level language or operating system available for it for the first few years. | | | Connect to the Altair Computer: Boot up BASIC and try it out for yourself! |
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http://museum.sysun.com/museum/alt.html
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| | microsoft's timeline from 1975 - 1990 |
| | The MITS Altair inspired a new generation of technology enthusiasts, including Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who were among the first of these early hobbyists to realize that the key to the future of personal computing lay in the unlimited potential of software. | | | Using the Altair's published specifications, Gates and Allen created a simulator on a DEC PDP-10 computer that allowed it to emulate the MITS machine. | | | MITS promotes Altair BASIC, the computer language developed by Gates and Allen for the Altair computer. |
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http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.htm
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| | Internet C@fé Sverige: Altair 8800 |
| | This is when the micro computer was born. | | | In the magazine you could learn about from where you could order the parts for the computer and you got tips about how to build it. | | | MITS would deliver the computer and the cheapest version would cost 397 dollars. |
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http://www.hogia.se/pcmuseum/datorernasvarld/ALTAIR.HTM
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| | [No title] |
| | In the Editorial of this issue the Altair is announced as a "Home computer". | | | We scanned the pages related to the Altair 8800 for the interested collector. | | | In the grey box Edward Robert lists possible appclications for the Altair 8800 computer. |
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http://www.computermuseum.20m.com/popelectronics.htm
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| | The Citizen Scientist |
| | The kit version of the Altair sold for only $395, but it lacked the sophistication of the business computers. | | | We soon learned that the Altair had inspired a computing revolution. | | | Business computers sold for tens of thousands of dollars and were the size of office file cabinets. |
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http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2005/2005-01-28/editorial
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| | [No title] |
| | In January 1975, Popular Electronics magazine's cover featured a picture of the Altair 8800 computer - the world's first microcomputer which used the new Intel 8080 processor - sold mail order by a tiny company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. | | | People sent checks in sight unseen - completely on the faith they Ed Roberts realized that his Altair 8800 computer needed software - a computer language - to make it really useful. | | | Things never settled down - in one day they sold 200 computers over the phone. |
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http://www.cis.usouthal.edu/faculty/daigle/project1/1975malt.htm
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| | [No title] |
| | And in the end I added "of course an Altair 8800 computer in any shape". | | | On top of the Altair was the Popular Electronics Magazine and next to it the Heathkit H8. | | | He told me that he wanted to start a computer museum a few years ago and he started to collect some computers. |
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http://www.computermuseum.20m.com/altairstory.htm
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| | The First Personal Computers (PCs) |
| | This BASIC interpreter, which was written by Gates and Allen, was the first reasonably high-level computer language program to be made available on a home computer. | | | Even though it only contained a miserly 256 bytes of RAM and the only way to program it was by means of a switch panel, the Altair 8800 proved to be a tremendous success. | | | Roberts decided to take a gamble with what little funds remained available to him, and he started to design a computer called the Altair 8800 (the name "Altair" originated in one of the early episodes of Star Trek). |
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http://www.maxmon.com/1973ad.htm
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| | PC History |
| | The reaction to the Altair was un-expected by either the magazine or by MITS who designed it. | | | It supplanted the Altair A model as the standard S-100 Bus computer. | | | The Imsai 8080 developed by IMS Associates, was designed to use the same bus structure as the Altair 8800 with interchangeable circuit boards. |
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http://www.pc-history.org
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| | Altair 8800 |
| | I've seen other Altairs that lack these, so I don't know if they are official MITS stuff or not. | | | Working around the poor design of the Altair and creating modifications to upgrade it to the present level of operation required a lot of work." | | | Click here to view comments about other MITS computers. |
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http://obsoletecomputermuseum.org/altair
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| | MITS Altair 680 |
| | Although the 680 was "pre-announced" on the cover of the November, 1975 issue of Popular Electronics (following the similar introduction of its big brother, the Altair 8800), the headline trumpeting "THE FIRST MOTOROLA 6800 COMPUTER PROJECT" was not the whole truth. | | | If this particular 680 looks new, that's because it is. It was assembled in 1999 from unused original MITS parts. | | | It's hard to say which computer actually shipped first in quantity. |
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http://www.computercloset.org/MITSAltair680.htm
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| | OLD-COMPUTERS.COM : The Museum |
| | However the 8800b remained compatible with all Altair 8800 hardware and software. | | | The CPU board was also modified: new 8080A processor and Intel chip sets. | | | We need more info about this computer ! |
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http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=896
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| | Altair 8800 - OneLook Dictionary Search |
| | Altair 8800 : Free On-line Dictionary of Computing [home, info] | | | Altair 8800 : Dictionary of Computing and Digital Media [home, info] | | | Tip: Click on the first link on a line below to go directly to a page where "Altair 8800" is defined. |
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http://www.onelook.com/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/bware/dofind.cgi?word=Altair+8800
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| | The Computing Revolution |
| | The Altair 8800 was the first successful personal computer. | | | The computer on the cover is a fake. | | | To everyone's surprise, including the Altair's makers, it was a runaway success. |
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http://www.mos.org/exhibits/ComputingRevolution/pcs/4.html
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