History of Computers - Altair 8800
--Rbeckner 09:25, 10 September 2010 (CDT)
The Altair 8800 was one of the first microcomputers available for personal use. Although its abilities were somewhat limited, it proved to be a powerful indicator for what simple home computers could do and helped spark a personal computer revolution.
Origin
The Altair 8800 was a computer developed by MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) in 1975. MITS was a company that got its start selling model rocket kits, but soon diversified into electronic calculator kits. When Texas Instruments started selling their own calculators for half the industry price, other corporations in the electronic calculator industry found themselves in economic trouble. MITS was in peril, and founder Ed Roberts needed a solution to his $250,000 debt and so the Altair 8800 was created. The Altair 8800 was originally designed to be a do-it-yourself kit computer that would be sold to to a few hobbyists and computer enthusiasts. However, both the kit version and assembled version sold very well and MITS went on to make more complex versions of the original Altair 8800 [1].
Components
The Altair 8800 was not a very complicated device. It had no screen or mouse and instructions were relayed to it by punched tape transcripts. The Altair 8800 utilized the Intel 8080 microprocessor and had four motherboards[2]. The bus used by the Altair 8800 was widely cloned by various other start-up companies inspired by the success of MITS. In 1976 the industry agreed that the standard bus for computers sharing the Altair template was to be the S-100 bus [3].
Significance
The Altair 8800 was one of the first computers available for personal use. Before the Altair 8800, computers were generally in the hands of wealthy corporate institutions. The Altair 8800 revolutionized the computing world by allowing common people to have their own personal computer to use as they pleased. The Altair 8800 also was responsible for the rise of Microsoft as a computing industry giant. Microsoft's first product, the operating system Altair BASIC, was designed for the Altair 8800[4].
Links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800
