MITS, a small Albuquerque electronics firm, began fulfilling orders for its Altair 8800 kit computer, first announced via Popular Electronics magazine's January 1975 issue. Enthusiasts assembled the machine themselves, toggling switches to input programs since it initially had no keyboard or screen. Its runaway popularity among hobbyists convinced Paul Allen and Bill Gates to write a BASIC interpreter for it, leading them to found Microsoft.
The Altair 8800 looked more like a metal breadbox with switches and blinking lights than anything resembling a modern computer. Built around Intel's 8080 microprocessor, it sold as a mail-order kit for $439—cheap enough that thousands of electronics hobbyists ordered one sight unseen after seeing it on the cover of Popular Electronics.
Early units had no keyboard, monitor, or permanent storage; users entered programs by flipping toggle switches in binary and read output from blinking lights, a process that could take hours for the simplest task. Despite this brutal user experience, the Altair became the first commercially successful personal computer, selling far beyond MITS founder Ed Roberts's expectations and creating an entire cottage industry of add-on cards and peripherals.
Its cultural impact outstripped its technical limitations. Two young men in Massachusetts, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, saw the magazine cover and raced to write a BASIC programming language interpreter for the machine, licensing it to MITS and founding a company they called Micro-Soft. The Altair also galvanized the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, whose members—including Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs—would soon build machines of their own.
Key people: Ed Roberts, Bill Gates, Paul Allen