MITS Altair 8800 (1976)
Accession Number: X1827.2000
Gift of Craig Payne

The Altair 8800 is commonly thought of as the first successful "personal computer" or "PC." Albuquerque, New Mexico company MITS built calculators and terminal systems throughout the early 1970s, but, says company founder Ed Roberts, "when we found out about the Intel 8080 in late 1973, we started design on the Altair, which was finished in the summer of 1974." Initially, programs had to be entered a line at a time with the switches on the front panel. Soon, MITS and other manufacturers were offering expansion memory boards, and the 4K BASIC interpreter written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen [Item 5, previous] became a standard.

The demand for the $395.00 machine exceeded MITS' wildest expectations. More machines were sold in the first day (through a Popular Electronics cover story) than the company expected to sell during the entire lifetime of the product. Roberts points out that the Altair increased the installed base of computers in the world by 1% each month during 1975-76. The company was eventually superceded by other, more powerful and flexible computers, in particular a triumvirate of mass-produced, consumer-friendly machines: the Apple II, Commodore PET, and Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80.