Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

Summary

You might think that Apple, Commodore or perhaps Radio Shack made the first personal computer, but you’d be wrong. Although the Apple I appeared in 1976, and then in 1977 the Apple II, Commodore PET and TRS-80 all appeared, there was one personal computer that preceded them all: The MITS Altair 8800 from 1975, considered the first commercially successful personal computer.The Altair was created by a small company called MITS, which initially stood for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry. In 1974 MITS had been selling calculator kits via mail order. Later in the year they started working on a computer based on the then-new Intel 8080 8-bit CPU. About this time they were contacted by Popular Electronics magazine who was looking to do a feature on a computer project.The Altair name was taken from the brightest star in the Aquila constellation. It is one of the closest stars to Earth and the name was considered futuristic.This all coincided with the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. The Altair was featured on the cover and there was a companion article (written by Ed Roberts, owner of MITS) titled “Project Breakthrough! World’s First Mini-computer Kit to Rival Commercial Models”.The computer kit sold for $397 (about $2359 in 2023). Being a kit, that meant that you had to assemble the computer yourself. It didn’t even have a keyboard or display as you used it via its toggle switches and blinking lights! For your money you got the case, power supply, motherboard, CPU board, front panel with switches and LEDs, 256 bytes of RAM and assembly instructions. You could pay a little more and have it pre-assembled for you, but that would have delayed delivery. It was so popular that people were known to drive to Albuquerque, New Mexico to personally pick one up!The Altair doesn’t look all that “personal” today, but it is considered a personal computer because a single person could afford to purchase it themselves, something remarkable for 1975.Initially MITS had hoped to ...