MITS

~ the goodbye ~

MITS did not set out to invent the personal computer. It was founded in december 1969 by Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims to sell telemetry kits for model rockets, moved into electronic calculators in 1971, and was nearly destroyed in 1974 when the big semiconductor companies started selling finished calculators for less than MITS paid for parts. The Altair was a last attempt to stay solvent.

It reached newsstands in the week before christmas 1974, on the january 1975 cover of Popular Electronics, and the price was the shock. A computer, in a case, for a few hundred dollars as a kit. Editor Les Solomon had pushed for exactly that, a complete machine rather than another build-it-from-scratch article, and the name came out of the magazine office rather than the factory. One version of the story has Solomon's daughter naming it after where the Enterprise was heading that night on television.

What arrived in the mail was a box with an 8080 processor, 256 bytes of memory, a row of toggle switches on the front and a row of red lights next to them. That was the interface. You entered a program in binary by flipping switches, and you read the answer off the lights. Everything else arrived later as boards you paid extra for, including storage and any way of typing at all. A thousand orders came in during february 1975 against expectations of a few hundred for the year, and MITS spent most of its remaining life failing to ship fast enough.

The Altair predates me by nine years and predates my first modem by twenty three. By the time I saw an S-100 machine it was already museum furniture, a thing photographed from the front so you could see the switches. It is the only computer I know of whose most famous feature is that it could not do anything at all when you took it out of the box.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the cover ~

The january 1975 issue did something no product launch has managed since, which is to create both a market and a hobby in the same month. Homebrew Computer Club formed in a garage in Menlo Park that march because people wanted somewhere to talk about the machine they had ordered and were still waiting for. The Altair's expansion bus, designed in a hurry and not especially well, became the S-100 standard that dozens of companies built on for the next six years.

Two young men in Boston saw the cover and called Albuquerque claiming they had a BASIC for the machine. They did not have one yet. They wrote it on a simulator, Paul Allen flew out with a paper tape, and it worked on the second try. The contract was signed on 22 july 1975 for three thousand dollars up front plus royalties, capped at a hundred and eighty thousand. That was Microsoft's first product and MITS was its first customer.

~ the funny part ~

MITS could not build memory boards that worked properly. Its 4K dynamic RAM boards were unreliable enough that customers started buying static memory from other companies instead, and Processor Technology built a business on that failure. A company selling a computer that needed expansion boards had effectively subcontracted its own product line to competitors within a year of launch.

The other famous consequence was the paper tape. Altair BASIC cost real money, the tapes copied perfectly, and enough of them circulated at club meetings that Bill Gates wrote an open letter to hobbyists in february 1976 asking them to stop. It is probably the first public argument about software piracy, and it happened because the software in question was the only thing making a machine full of switches usable.

~ what it became ~

Roberts signed a letter of intent with Pertec in december 1976 and closed the sale in may 1977 for about six million dollars in stock. Pertec made disk and tape drives for minicomputers, understood the Altair as a product line rather than a movement, and proceeded to lose both. Staff left and then Roberts left. The Altair was rebadged as the PCC 8800 in 1978 and quietly dropped after that. The Albuquerque plant closed in december 1980.

1977 was also the year the Apple II and the TRS-80 arrived with keyboards and screens as standard, so the switch panel was obsolete on schedule regardless of who owned the company. Ed Roberts took the money, went to medical school, and practiced as a country doctor in Cochran, Georgia until his death in 2010. Bill Gates and Paul Allen visited him in the hospital at the end. The first customer and the first supplier, thirty five years on from a paper tape.

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