50 years ago: Hobbyists set off on the road to the PC revolution

Contents

Exactly 50 years ago, on November 29, 1974, also a Friday, the January issue of the widely read US magazine "Popular Electronics" went to the printers. It was due to reach subscribers in mid-December and be on newsstands between the years at the latest. Hobbyists and radio enthusiasts then enjoyed studying the building instructions and making plans for the coming year. A revolutionary DIY project was announced on the cover as a sensation: the construction of a mini-computer called "Popular Electronics/MITS Altair 8800". A fake was shown, as the actual kit was lost on its way from MITS to the editorial office. The description of the kit was also a fake. The authors were Ed Roberts and Bill Yates, head and chief engineer at MITS, but the text explaining how a computer works to radio amateurs was written by marketing manager Ed Bunnell.

MITS, which stood for "Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems", had its "world headquarters" in Albuquerque. From there, the late Ed Roberts and a handful of employees supplied enthusiastic hobbyists with kits for calculators until companies such as Texas Instruments began to sell their own inexpensive, fully assembled calculators. While searching for alternatives, Roberts came across a clue in the competition from Popular Electronics: In the July 1974 issue, Radio Electronics had already presented the Mark-8 by student Jonathan A. Titus, a kit for an 8-bit computer with the Intel 8008 processor. However, the parts sent by post were not complete and interested parties had to buy additional components for a case. Roberts wanted to change this with his offer. Around the Intel 8080 chip, which he received for a very reasonable 75 dollars, he constructed a drawer-sized computer with a working memory of 256 bytes and a price of 397 dollars as a kit or 498 dollars fully assembled.

The invention of the home computer

Whether Roberts contacted the editors of Popular Electronics with his DIY kit or whether they contacted him because they needed a project for the important January issue can no longer be determined today. In any case, they agreed to announce the computer kit as "Popular Electrronics/MITS Altair 8800" on the cover of the magazine and discuss it in the lead article. In the memorable January issue (PDF), Editor-in-Chief Arthur Salsberg rejoiced in the editorial "The Home Computer Is Here!" and wrote in the paper, "Unlike a calculator – and we feature a scientific calculator for less than $90 in this issue, computers can make logical decisions for an accounting system, a navigation system, a time-share computer, a burglar alarm system, or a thousand other applications. The Altair 8800 is so powerful that it can handle many programs simultaneously." This bombastic introduction was followed by a text by ghostwriter David Bunnell, who explained to readers (PDF, pp. 33-38) how the system worked. However, Ed Roberts and Bill Yates were named as the authors.

Named after a star

What chief engineer Yates had designed with four assembled circuit boards and CEO Roberts had procured cheaply from the purchasing department was simply christened PE-8 at MITS, Popular Electronics 8-Bit. This was too colorless for the supervising PE editor Leslie Salomon. He wanted a real name like Micral-N, the French 8-bit microcomputer he had presented in the magazine. His daughter Lauren suggested using the name of the computer from the Starship Enterprise – but it didn't have a name. As the Enterprise had just flown to the planet Altair 6 in the episode Amok Time (Space Fever) in the TV series, the kit was given the name Altair. Another version of the name can be found here.

Salomon told this nice anecdote at the first (and only) World Altair Computer Convention (PDF) organized by David Bunnell in the spring of 1976. It was very well received, because the interest in the Altair 8800 was enormous. By May 1975, 2500 interested parties had ordered the kit, which was a long time coming. In August, the number had even risen to 5000 orders. The success was so great that Heathkit, the largest US manufacturer of electronic kits, produced its own kit, the H8, with the Intel 8080 and even gave it a keypad on the front and an operating system called HDOS (written by Gordon Letwin, the later chief developer of OS/2). But this simply happened too late. In any case, many customers attended Altair's computer convention to find out whether the kit would be delivered at all. In his memoirs, Bunnell writes that the sighs of relief were audible when he was assured that all orders would be processed one by one.

BASIC from a long-haired student

In his autobiography called "Possiplex" , Ted Nelson describes his visit to this convention. He recorded in his diary that he spoke with Leslie Salomon and Ed Roberts and talked to a "long-haired Harvard student" about the inadequate high-level software available for the Altair 8800. The long-haired man denied this and pointed to his Altair BASIC, which was available for the computer. The name of the previously unknown programmer: Bill Gates. Like thousands of other electronics fans, Gates had devoured the presentation of the Altair 8800 in Popular Electronics and immediately phoned his friend Paul Allen. "We were excited to read about the first real personal computer, and although we had no idea exactly what it would be used for, we soon realized that it would change us and the world of computing," Gates later wrote in the book "The Way Forward".

Allen and Gates sent a letter to MITS on January 2, 1975, stating that they had developed a BASIC ready to run on MCS-8080 micros. "We are interested in selling this software to hobbyists through you. It can be supplied on cassette or floppy disks to users of your ALTAIR microcomputer. We are thinking of getting 50 dollars per copy from you, while you can sell the copy for 75 to 100 dollars." This letter was sent on Traf-O-Data letterhead and signed by "Paul G. Allen, President". Traf-O-Data was Allen and Gates' first company, founded to write traffic monitoring software. After a few phone calls with Ed Roberts, Allen flew to Albuquerque and was finally hired as "Director of Software" at MITS on March 3, 1975, while Gates worked in Boston at Harvard University on a BASIC variant for the Intel 8080. It was finally available in two versions, which could be ordered from MITS for 150 and 200 US dollars respectively. In order to be able to offer this BASIC for Altair clones, Gates and Allen founded the company "Micro-Soft". As "General Partner, Micro-Soft", Bill Gates wrote an open letter to the hobbyists (PDF) in February 1976, which caused a furor at the Altair Convention. The rest is known.

The Belle Époque of IT

David Bunnell, the author of the Popular Electronics article on the Altair 8800 and organizer of the World Altair Computer Convention, later wrote of the PC revolution: "For those of us who have been in this industry since the early days of the personal computer revolution in the mid-seventies, it has been a wonderful time, a belle époque of IT with incredible innovations. We witnessed amazing technological breakthroughs, we tapped into force fields we had never dreamed existed, we experienced situations of almost metaphysically palpable wonder as we felt the immense power of the information age catapulting us into the 21st century." In his text, which appeared at the end of 1987, he invited readers to continue the history of generally available computers that began with the Altair 8800 with the possibilities of online communication that were emerging at the time. With the now communicating, "participative PC", nothing less than democracy was to be saved. In 2012, he allowed heise online to translate this appeal into a Christmas edition.

(mho)