IMSAI 8080

~ the eulogy ~

The Altair 8800 arrived in january 1975 and was, by common agreement including that of the people who bought it, badly made. The memory boards would not reliably hold data and the power supply ran at its limit. William Millard's IMS Associates in San Leandro had been doing contract work on a computerized system for car dealerships and saw the gap immediately. The IMSAI 8080 shipped its first kits on 16 december 1975 at $439, or $621 if you wanted it assembled, and it was the same idea built properly.

Same Intel 8080 and the same S-100 bus, in a far heavier case with a power supply that could actually feed a full complement of boards. The front panel is the part everybody pictures: rows of red and blue paddle switches, grouped in threes because you entered addresses in octal, with a bank of lights above them showing what was in memory. It was a serious machine at hobbyist prices, and between 17,000 and 20,000 of them were built. In 1977 the company paid Gary Kildall $25,000 for a license to CP/M version 1.3, which IMSAI reworked into its own IMDOS, and that license did more for the industry than the hardware did.

Then Millard went into retail. Sales of the 8080 were falling, so in 1977 he opened a store called Computer Shack, renamed ComputerLand once Radio Shack's lawyers noticed, and franchised it hard. The money and the management went with it. Zilog's Z80 had made the 8080 look old since 1976 and the follow-up products landed badly. IMSAI's own franchise dealers would not stock anything from the company except the machine that was already obsolete. IMS Associates filed for bankruptcy in october 1979. ComputerLand went on to be worth a fortune.

WarGames reached cinemas the year before I was born and I caught it on television long after that, which means the IMSAI arrived for me as a picture and never arrived as a machine. What the film understood is that a computer has to look like it is thinking, and a wall of switches with lights blinking above them does that without a word of dialogue. Everything I work on now runs headless. You learn what it is doing by reading a log over a link, and if the link drops you learn nothing at all until it comes back. The IMSAI told you continuously, in binary, whether you wanted to know or not.

~ the dossier ~

~ the front panel ~

Programming one of these from cold meant setting an address in switches and then setting a byte in switches, depositing it, and doing that again for every byte until the program was in memory. Nobody enjoyed it. The panel existed because the alternative was a teletype you had not bought yet, and it stayed on the front long after most owners had a terminal, because it was also how you debugged a machine that had no operating system to ask.

IMSAI's version was better engineered than the Altair's and it is worth being specific about why. The switches were rated for real use rather than for one enthusiastic evening, and the panel logic behind them was cleaner. That is the whole product. Not a new idea, a competently manufactured version of somebody else's, which is a business that has never once been glamorous and has always worked.

~ how it actually ended ~

Millard required his executives to take Erhard Seminars Training, and the account in Fire in the Valley is that this produced a management culture unwilling to admit a task might be impossible. Deadlines were accepted rather than assessed. The VDP-80, an all-in-one machine meant to carry the company past the 8080, shipped late and poorly and the dealers refused it.

By 1979 the company was a shell with its capital in a retail chain and its product line four years old. Bankruptcy in october was formality. Two former employees, Thomas Fischer and Nancy Freitas, had taken the trademark and kept building IMSAI machines under their own company from october 1978, which is why the brand outlived the manufacturer. The registration finally lapsed on 6 april 2004.

~ what it became ~

In 1983 a teenager in a bedroom in Seattle dialed into a military computer on an IMSAI 8080, and the machine became permanent. WarGames used it because it looked correct, and by looking correct on film it became the shape most people picture when they picture a 1970s computer, above machines that sold ten times as many units. A prop outlived the product.

The rest of the inheritance is stranger and larger. The CP/M license IMSAI bought in 1977 helped make Kildall's operating system the standard for 8080 and Z80 machines, which is the thing IBM went looking for in 1980 and failed to buy, which is how Microsoft ended up selling them DOS instead. And ComputerLand, funded out of this company's cash while the machine was still selling, put more than eight hundred stores on the ground and was the channel that the IBM PC walked through. IMS Associates died of both of its own successes.

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