I still have my copy of the 1975 issue of Popular Electronics with the Altair on the cover.
H. Edward Roberts died this week at age 68. If you don’t know the story of how Roberts helped launch the personal computing revolution, let us fill you in.
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Even with $250,000 in debt and a collapsing business, Ed. Roberts didn’t waver from his commitment to personal computing. He persevered building the prototype of the first personal computer, the Altair 8800, named unofficially after a planet visited in the Star Trek episode Amok Time.The Altair 8800 saved the company. Ed. Roberts had brokered a deal with Intel to buy Intel 8080 chips in bulk for $75/chip (normally they were $360/chip). The cheap CPUs allowed the Altair 8800 to retail for $439 ($621 assembled) at the time when Intel’s Intellec-8 Microprocessor Development System, another Intel 8080 based system, sold for $10,000.
The cheap Altair 8800 not only proved a mild commercial hit, but it helped launch the world’s biggest electronics company today, Microsoft. In 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen, students at Harvard at the time read about the Altair. They contacted Ed. Roberts telling him they were developing a programming language interpreter and asking if he was interested in purchasing in it.
I had that issue of Popular Electronics, but couldn’t afford the Altair, nor any of the others that came along for some time.
My first was the COSMAC ELF, which was featured in the pages of Radio Electronics magazine. The CPU was made by RCA, of all people! It was all CMOS and completely static; that is, the clock could run at any speed from maximum all the way down to zero. The ELF had a hex keypad instead of a bank of switches, thank goodness! In the Texas summer I used to have to put a baggie with a couple of ice cubes in it on the CPU or the video chip (either one would work) to keep the 32 character by 20 line video from fuzzing out.
Eventually I got the I/O card, the RS-232 ASCII keyboard and the 4K RAM kit. After loading in Tiny BASIC from cassette it had about 400 bytes free! I gotta say, the keyboard was a giant step up from keying in ASCII codes on the hex keypad. The power supply worked great as a battery charger for my Volkswagen Bug, too!
The Tiny BASIC was amazing! It was so limited but it would do things that would be impossible in any self-respecting programming language today. For example, computed GOTOs. You could LET X=(formula) then GOTO X. If there were no X, it would GOTO the next highest number! Or you could skip the last step and just GOTO (formula). To save program memory, I’d key in the values of a bunch of variables in immediate mode before running a program, just so I wouldn’t have to take up scarce space by declaring them in the code. Learning how to call and return from subroutines in the 1802′s machine code was a real adventure!
Ah, memories!
My copy of the 1975 Popular Electronics was donated to the University of New Mexico Centennial Engineering Library. Hopefully no one lifted that copy.
You mean he didn’t buy it from someone else, re-brand it, and sell it as his invention!
“but what could the Altair do with no keyboard, no display? I never understood the point of the Altair other than it being an oversized calculator?”
If I understand the machine, it had switches on the front to set for the binary format input, and LEDs to represent the binary format result, and presumably some way to input your desired function. This would require you to understand binary notation. Didn’t people eventually mate it to keyboards and CRT monitors?
I got into computers as a young teen way back when a old school hacker gave me a copy of Byte magazine. This was in the days when you could buy space war on paper tape, and you punched in hundreds of lines of BASIC from the magazines to run a program. Little did I realize how much that first Byte mag would come to influence the rest of my life… It’s been a long and fun time, and it’s truly amazing how far we’ve come. I look forward to the next 30 years!
The closest today’s kids come to technology immersion is in Robotics ! Check out Make Magazine … PIC Computer chips and stepper motors make the robots go ….
A $2 AVR micro-controller is probably todays closest equivalent. And what young people
should play with to understand what goes on
inside the cpu.
Search for “Triumph of the Nerds” on video sites
to understand Mr Roberts and the other brilliant
people of that time.
Believe it or not, but my first “computer” was a sheet of brown Masonite board, with holes drilled in it. As part of a kit, that supplied wire, light bulbs, a battery holder, screws, 6″ Masonite disks, and brass contact studs. Which acted as connectors between pairs of screws. Thus was simulated various “logic gates” (multi-pole switches) in a crude, manually operated way.
One of the wiring designs supplied was a Tic Tac Toe playing machine. Which never worked right. Many years later, when I went over the diagrams, and discovered it had been drawn up wrong. Simulating the “Stepped Logic” on my TI calculator, it played just fine. The kit maker never issued any addendum. I think the kit cost my father about $100, at the time.
I didn’t get to touch a real computer, until John Hopkins Univ. donated some old tube model, desk cabinet thing, to our local Science Academy. Which offered a programming course, over the summer, for the kids. When it wasn’t broken down, I got a chance to stick pins in placards that created its machine language instructions. Another week, and I’d had that Tic Tac Toe game running. But another breakdown cut the schedule time short. Boohoo.
@Zybch
I first learned of Dr Roberts’ work from the television series “Triumph of the Nerds” which is available on Video google. Why not look it up and find out what everybody is talking about.
Without Dr Roberts there would probably be no modern personal computer industry!
Ed Roberts did much, much more than develop the Altair 8800 microcomputer. He pioneered the personal computer industry with the first newsletter, convention, sales force, software and peripherals that were all targeted at individual customers who wanted to join the computer age. Dr. Roberts even designed what would have become the first laptop computer had Pertec, the firm that bought his company (MITS), followed through. In death he is finally receiving the worldwide recognition he has always deserved.
Forrest M. Mims III