Manually halted, the memory would be loaded with whatever program and data you Instead, it featured banks of lights and switches. The Altair, like all entry-level computers of the day, had no screen and no keyboard. So large was just crazy-talk not the least because the memory would lose its contents every The architecture allowed for up to 64k of RAM, but anything It came standard with 256 bytes of RAM (not, gigabytes, not megabytes, not Likely inside your desktop or laptop computer, but several million times less powerful. The MITS Altair ran an Intel 8080 processor at 2Mhz - the direct ancestor of the processor Is large and slow to load, but gives a good flavor of the time. Recognise the exciting thing about computers is software, moreso than building hardware.īill Gates and his partner Paul Allen wrote the very first Basic interpreter (high level language) for the Altair, the start of Microsoft. MITS also started selling pre-assembled machines for $621 as people came to
The article, and the Altair, also stimulated the creation of the Homebrew Computer Club,Ī place where Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs would go to hang out with like-minded souls,Īnd eventually gave rise to Apple, and the iPhone probably lurking in your pocket.Ĭonstruction was not for the faint-hearted, and many of the kits were not successfullyĪssembled. There was something in the air the computer revolution was willing itself to happen. But any other computer of the time would cost at least ten times that much.Įd Roberts only expected to sell a few hundred kits, but much to his surprise he sold This was about two weeks income for the average household at the time, so stillĪ pretty big deal. Using a soldering iron and a kit of components, for around $439 you could build your Issues of Popular Electronics magazine, designed by a fellow called Ed Roberts. The Altair sprang to life as a construction project in the January and February 1975 It works just like a real Altair,Īnd runs at the correct 2Mhz clock speed. Volatile memory, and a functioning Intel 8080 processor. Here is a faithful simulation of a MITS Altair, complete with fan noise, switch clicks, You can still find Altairs in museums, and some lucky individuals still have their machines. Really work that puts you in an elite echelon. If you can write even the simplest of programs on an Altair, then you have a level of insight into how computers Programming the Altair was programming the bare metal - no operating system.
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These days many professional programmers do not understand computers from the bottom to the top,īecause they've always worked in high-level languages and made use of extensively layered software.
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The wonderful thing about learning to code on an Altair meant there was nowhere for the magic to hide. Now everybody has a computer in their pocket.īut it all started with the Altair, and Bill Gates (sometimes Richest Guy on Earth) got his first big break on the Altair. The MITS Altair is widely accepted to be the computer that first kicked off the personal computer age.īefore the MITS Altair, owning a computer was not something individuals did.
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