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| | Altair 8800 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
 | | 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. | | | By 1976 there were a number of much better built machines on the market, and when Roberts started demanding the newly-appearing computers stores sell only Altair machines, they instead turned to the competition and in a turn of irony MITS was quickly squeezed out of the market they themselves had created. |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800
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| | The IMSAI 8800 |
| | MITS used a standard Optima case to house the computer, and its shape dictated the mounting position of the motherboards. | | | 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. |
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http://pc-history.org/imsai.htm
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| | MITS Altair 8800 computer |
| | The Altair 8800, from Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS) of Albuquerque, NM, was first featured in the January 1975 edition of Popular Electronics. | | | Numerous computers from other manufacturers were designed around the S-100 bus - the IMSAI 8800 was the first - the first computer clone. | | | 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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| | MITS Altair Systems |
| | The MITS Altair microcomputer was the first personal computer available and sold in commercial quantities. | | | Later, MITS became a subsidiary of Pertec Computer Corp. | | | Sold as both kits and as assembled units, MITS called the computer system boxes "Main Frames" and featured both Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 CPU powered units. |
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http://rwebs.net/micros/altair
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| | Altair32 Emulator Project - Specs |
| | Disk Extended BASIC was the commonly used software for serious users of the Altair computer. | | | Altair32 emulates a "loaded" Altair 8800 containing an Intel 8080 CPU board with 64k of RAM (the limit of the 8080's address space). | | | A person owning an Altair in the late-70's would probably be running either MITS Disk Extended BASIC or the then brand new CP/M Operating System from {Intergalactic} Digital Research. |
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http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp/Altair32specs.htm
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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 History |
| | Minicomputers cost more than the Altair and IBM Mainframe computers and Super Computers were very expensive. | | | The Altair was called a "Hobbyist Computer" because few users could afford enough parts and peripherals to built a "complete" computer system. | | | The Altair was not called a Personal Computer. |
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http://www.virtualaltair.com/virtualaltair.com/vac_history.asp
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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. | | | The Altair articles ran for several issues of Popular Electronics, and as a result MITS was deluged with orders. |
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http://www.pc-history.org/altair.htm
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| | MITS Altair 8800 Simulator Configuration |
| | 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 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. | | | 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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| | The MITS Altair |
| | The MITS Altair is perhaps the most famous early computer. | | | The Altair was not the first personal computer. | | | BASIC 2.0 is released for the MITS Altair |
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http://www.blinkenlights.com/altair.shtml
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| | HistoryWired: A few of our favorite things |
| | 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. | | | The designation "8800" referred to the fact that the computer used the new Intel 8080 chip. |
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http://historywired.si.edu/object.cfm?ID=339
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| | Apple II History Chap 1 |
| | The difficulty MITS had in supplying the demand for computers also led to the creation of other similar computers that used the 8080. | | | At the same time that MITS was looking for something to revive the company, Popular Electronics magazine was looking for a computer construction article that would exceed the Mark-8 computer project that had appeared on the July 1974 Radio-Electronics cover. | | | MITS hoped that they would get about four hundred orders for the computer, trickling in over the two months that the two-part article would be printed. |
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http://apple2history.org/history/ah01.html
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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. | | | All programming was in the machine code of binary digits. | | | 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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| | Online Ethics Center for Engineering & Science: Altair History |
| | It turned the Altair into a real computer, capable of solving real-world problems, and exciting computer hobbyists where ever it was demonstrated. | | | Featured on the cover was the computer that jump-started the computer hobbyist movement and set the course for the personal computer revolution. | | | Although many computer hobbyists of the mid-seventies were upset by MITS pricing and software licensing policies, much of those same software licensing policies are with us today, having become the standard way of "protecting" consumer software. |
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http://onlineethics.org/contest/altair
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| | OLD-COMPUTERS.COM : HISTORY / detailed info |
| | Therefore, MITS and the Altair truly created the personal computer industry and changed the way many people live and work. | | | The Altair 8800 was also the first computer using a built-in Basic interpreter written by two guys working at MITS and called Bill Gates and Paul Allen. | | | Pertec continued making Altairs small business System for about a year after the acquisition, moving away from the "Hobbyist Computer" image of the 8800. |
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http://www.old-computers.com/history/detail.asp?n=34&t=2
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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. | | | These are of the bare MITS 4 slot motherboards as originally shipped with the Altair computers (both top and bottom) and of the Altair front panel. | | | The MITS SIO-2 (2 serial ports) board was a mainstay of Altair systems, connecting them with terminals, teletypes and all sorts of other peripherals. |
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http://www.vintage-computer.com/altair8800.shtml
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| | Altair32 Emulator Project - MITS History |
| | 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. | | | The MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, founded in 1968 or 1969 depending on whether you talk to Ed Roberts or Forrest Mims) Altair 8800 was announced on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics. | | | 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. |
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http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp/Altair32history.htm
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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. | | | 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. | | | In december 1974, Popular Electronics publishes an article by MITS announcing the Altair 8800 computer for |
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http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/altair1.htm
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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://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci927695,00.html
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| | MITS Altair |
| | The Altair also proved to be the teething grounds for a couple of computer software nerds by the name of Bill Gates and Paul Allen who co wrote a Basic interpreter to be run on the Altair. | | | The Altair was in fact the first massed produced personal computer. | | | The Altair used an Intel 8080 processor and utilized the Basic software language. |
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http://www.backthruthefuture.com/mits.htm
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| | Microsoft - Hutchinson encyclopedia article about Microsoft |
| | Microsoft's first major product was a version of BASIC, written for the first personal computer, the MITS Altair, in 1975, and adopted by most of the desktop computer industry. | | | Through MS-DOS, written for IBM, Windows, and related applications it has steadily increased its hold on the personal computer market. |
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http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Microsoft
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| | [No title] |
| | Employees: 3 (Allen, Gates, and Ric Weiland) MITS promotes Altair BASIC, the computer language developed by Gates and Allen for the Altair computer. | | | This is the first computer language program written for a personal computer. | | | "it's about to begin!" On the cover is a mockup of the MITS Altair, the first personal computer. |
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http://hoover.sandi.net/CompSci/encyclop/MShist/import.htm
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| | The Age of Altair - A Users guide to the Mits Altair Computers |
| | In 1975 the personal computer era began in earnest with the introduction of The Altair 8800 by MITs. | | | The Age of Altair - A Users guide to the Mits Altair Computers | | | They wrote Microsoft's (Micro-soft at the time) first software: Altair Basic. |
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http://www.altairage.com
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| | Open Directory - 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://dmoz.org/Computers/Hardware/Historical/Altair_8800
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| | Jones Encyclopedia of Media & Technology Information |
| | The MITS Altair computer was the first commercially successful personal computer. | | | Although the Altair's capabilities were extremely limited by contemporary standards, the machine established a new direction for the computer industry and directly inspired the individuals who founded Apple Computer, Microsoft, and other computer companies of the 1980s and 1990s. | | | Altair Computer -- Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS) |
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http://www.jonesencyclo.com/profiles.cfm
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| | Altair 8800 |
| | MITS Logo - The legendary MITS Logo in dim light. | | | I've seen other Altairs that lack these, so I don't know if they are official MITS stuff or not. | | | Click here to view comments about other MITS computers. |
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http://obsoletecomputermuseum.org/altair
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| | MITS Altair 8800BT |
| | Towards the end of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) existance the company built on the success of their Altair line of computers with their first "turnkey" machine. | | | The software I have for my other Altair machines also works including Altair DOS 1.0 and FORTRAN. | | | The machine came with various manuals and disks including the 8800BT users manual, the 88-DCDD documents and the Altair BASIC manual. |
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http://www.vintage-computer.com/altair8800bt.shtml
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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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| | Phil Windley's Technometria Wanted: MITS Altair 8800 |
| | I'm looking to buy a MITS Altair 8800 computer if you know anyone who's got one. | | | I’m looking to buy a MITS Altair 8800 computer if you know anyone who’s got one. | | | Posted by windley on October 20, 2005 03:33 PM Tags: vintage, computer, 8080, mits, altair |
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http://www.windley.com/archives/2005/10/wanted_mits_alt.shtml
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| | Jurassic lark: Dell IDs world's oldest PC Tech News on ZDNet |
| | It's a 22-year-old MITS Altair 8800b, and it has been churning out wills and other legal documents for John C. Shepard, 49, a patent attorney who bought it as a toy, quickly turned it into a word processor, and then poured $13,000 into the system for upgrades along the way. | | | Wednesday its advanced age earned Shepard a dubious distinction: He was named from among 209 other entries as the winner of a Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq:DELL) contest to find the oldest working PC. | | | Shepard said he bought the machine -- with its 2 MHz processor and 256 bytes of memory -- right out of law school, in October, 1976. |
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http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-515488.html
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| | Mits Altair 8800 |
| | MITS made several peripherals and cards for this computer, namely, a video card, a serial card to connect a terminal, a RAM expansion card and an 8" floppy drive (70 KB). | | | The input port was called the "Sense Switches". | | | It has no keyboard, the "program" has to be entered with the switches located on the front panel of the "computer", and as it does not have video output (yet), the result is displayed via LEDs. |
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http://home1.gte.net/vze1re4o/id17.html
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| | MITS Altair |
| | Believe it or not, The Computer Store is still in operation in the same place as TCS. | | | Actually it was purchased from The Computer Store, an Altair shop, in Charleston WV in '76. | | | This Altair actually has 3 video outputs: The Polymorphic's card is the main console, the TI TMS9918 can draw color graphics composite out to another monitor, and the d/a converter can draw on the scope. |
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http://www.widomaker.com/~cswiger/altair.html
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| | DigiBarn: Altair 8800 System (1975) |
| | By the time I was done playing with it, my Altair had floppy disk drives and other refinements. | | | I think I had a few other useful options in this monitor-type program as well. | | | This is it folks, the original MITS Altair 8800 (approx serial number 3000). |
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http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/altair-8800
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| | MITS Altair 8800 |
| | The MITS Altair 8800 is widely known as the first real personal computer. | | | See below for specifications and information on this system. | | | Altair 8800 computer: $439 kit, $621 assembled (includes CPU board, front panel control board, power supply, and expander board) |
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http://www.computercloset.org/MITSAltair8800.htm
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| | MITS Altair 8800 and Apple I |
| | The MITS Altair 8800 was considered the first microcomputer. | | | Shown above are an Apple I and a MITS Altair 8800. | | | It went into production in 1975, and was based on the Intel 8080. |
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http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~csclub/museum/items/altair_8800_apple_1.html
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| | :: THE MITS ALTAIR 8800 :: |
| | As its first major project, Designhaus was hired to provide MITS with complete industrial design and product design strategy for the corporation, including user interface design, which would be applied to the MITS-ALTAIR 8800B PC computer. | | | Bill Gates and Paul Allen were hired to develop the MITS PC operating system. | | | In 1976, Ed Roberts, President of a new hobby computer firm, MITS, in Albuquerque, NM, hired two young start-up firms to help him launch a new corporate product line, the MITS-ALTAIR 8800B. |
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http://a.parsons.edu/~sachiko/hCw/002/altair.html
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