The Altair 8800, a build-it-yourself kit built around Intel's 8080 microprocessor and sold by MITS for under $400, appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics' February issue. Hobbyists flooded MITS with orders, and the machine's success prompted two young programmers, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, to write a BASIC interpreter for it, launching the company that became Microsoft.
Ed Roberts, an Albuquerque engineer running the struggling calculator company MITS, gambled the firm's future on a cheap computer kit built around Intel's new 8080 chip. He needed a splash, and Popular Electronics editor Les Solomon gave him one, putting a mockup of the machine on the magazine's cover (the actual prototype hadn't even arrived in time for the photo shoot).
The response overwhelmed MITS: readers mailed in checks for a machine that arrived as a box of parts requiring painstaking soldering, with no keyboard, screen, or software — only switches and blinking lights to program it in raw machine code. Still, thousands of orders poured in from hobbyists hungry to own a computer of their own for the first time.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard student Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen saw the cover and recognized their opening. They wrote a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair without ever having touched the actual hardware, testing their code on a simulator, then flew to Albuquerque to demonstrate it. It worked. Within weeks they founded Micro-Soft, and the personal computer industry was born from a magazine cover and a leap of faith.
Key people: Ed Roberts, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Les Solomon