The Box That Started Everything

The December 1974 issue of Popular Electronics featured a boxy blue machine on its cover: the Altair 8800. It cost $397 in kit form. No keyboard, no monitor, no storage. You programmed it by flipping switches, and the output was blinking lights. Barely a computer by modern standards. But it was the spark.

Ed Roberts, founder of MITS, was on the verge of bankruptcy. He bet everything on a computer built around Intel's 8080 microprocessor. He expected to sell maybe 200 units. Within weeks, thousands of orders poured in. Kits shipped incomplete -- sometimes just bags of parts. It didn't matter. Buyers weren't looking for a finished product. They wanted a starting point.

Hobbyists formed clubs. The Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley became legendary. Steve Wozniak attended. So did Steve Jobs. Two college students in Boston, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, wrote BASIC for the Altair without owning one -- they used a simulator. When it ran on real hardware, it worked. MITS licensed the software. Gates dropped out of Harvard. Microsoft was born.

altair 8800 front panel with toggle switches and led lights. source: wikimedia commons

The Altair didn't last. By 1977, the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 offered keyboards and screens. But the Altair had already done its job. Before 1974, computers were institutional. Expensive, room-sized, inaccessible. The Altair changed the mental model. A computer could be small, cheap, and yours. This was the same shift the Macintosh would complete a decade later.

The personal computer revolution started with a kit that barely worked, sold by a failing calculator company. The Altair wasn't elegant. But it was available. That was revolutionary enough.