Altair 8800

Altair 8800

The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975 based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January, 1975, issue of Popular Electronics, and was sold by mail order through advertisements there, in Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist magazines. The designers hoped to sell a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were surprised when they sold thousands in the first month. The Altair also appealed to individuals and businesses that just wanted a computer and purchased the assembled version. Today the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that led to the microcomputer revolution of the next few years: The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.