The original assembled Altair 8800 sold by MITS. They expanded on the original design and added floppy disk systems, teletypes, they wrote software, and more. It didn’t do much of anything until hobbyists found things to do with it. Just a series of switches and LEDs fixed to its front panel. It was the Altair that allowed both aspiring businessmen to not only build a minimal version of the BASIC programming language for the machine but to also start Microsoft. Most notably, it caught the attention of a young William Gates and Paul Allen.
The original computer was sold as a build-it-yourself kit and piqued the interest of many hobbyists worldwide. Based on the Intel 8080 CPU, the Altair was designed and sold by MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), an electronics company from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1974. This 65 pound behemoth of a computing system was essentially the very first personal microcomputer.
At the dawn of time came the Altair 8800.
