I still have my copy of the 1975 issue of Popular Electronics with the Altair on the cover.
H. Edward Roberts died this week at age 68. If you don’t know the story of how Roberts helped launch the personal computing revolution, let us fill you in.
[…]
Even with $250,000 in debt and a collapsing business, Ed. Roberts didn’t waver from his commitment to personal computing. He persevered building the prototype of the first personal computer, the Altair 8800, named unofficially after a planet visited in the Star Trek episode Amok Time.The Altair 8800 saved the company. Ed. Roberts had brokered a deal with Intel to buy Intel 8080 chips in bulk for $75/chip (normally they were $360/chip). The cheap CPUs allowed the Altair 8800 to retail for $439 ($621 assembled) at the time when Intel’s Intellec-8 Microprocessor Development System, another Intel 8080 based system, sold for $10,000.
The cheap Altair 8800 not only proved a mild commercial hit, but it helped launch the world’s biggest electronics company today, Microsoft. In 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen, students at Harvard at the time read about the Altair. They contacted Ed. Roberts telling him they were developing a programming language interpreter and asking if he was interested in purchasing in it.
An entire industry was built on the shoulders of visionary giants like Dr. Roberts.
Gates argues Roberts deserves recognition as the father of the personal computer.
but what could the Altair do with no keyboard, no display? I never understood the point of the Altair other than it being an oversized calculator.
“but it helped launch the world’s biggest electronics company today, Microsoft”
WTF, MS is an electronics company now?!
A great old personal computers timeline & info.
Still have my Ohio Scientific Superboard II purchased in 1978.
RBG
I loved that the guy looked like an engineer should — white shirt, skinny tie, pens in the pocket. Godspeed, Ed Roberts.
I work in public schools and there are very few computer geeks in my classes — none, really. Computers are just appliances for them to communicate with friends and get homework done.
I miss the days when you could go to your local KMart and buy a Sinclair or a TI99 or Commodore VIC20 and it wouldn’t be useful until you learned to program BASIC! Nearly all of we computer users were innovators back then.
Eric said,
“If I were buying computing power back then, I would have likely wanted an HP 25 calculator instead of an Altair.”
A year later I came to the same conclusion and bought the programmable HP-25 calculator. I used it through high school, college and a few years of work. It still works as well as the day I bought it.
.
RBG said,
“Still have my Ohio Scientific Superboard II purchased in 1978.”
I bought mine in 1979 for $350 (with case and P/S). I would have preferred an Apple II but they were over $1000 at the time. The last time I fired up the Ohio Scientific, it still worked! By the way the 6-digit floating point BASIC in ROM on the board is labeled, Copyright Microsoft 1978.
Right on Greg Allen.
I appreciate the sentiment expressed by #8, Gregg Allen. My first computer was the VIC 20. I learned to program in BASIC then Pascal (using an IBM PC). I’m just being sentimental but it seems sad those days are long gone and that few kids these days have any interest in programming. For those interested in reading more about the early days, I highly recommend the book “Fire in the Valley”.
Roberts was a true visionary. There were no mainstream computers before him, and he risked everything to sell an unproven computer, really an unproven idea, that anyone could buy if they wanted or needed it.
He was much like Burt Rutan, but launched so much more. Actually, he was more like the Wright Brothers.
Eventually there would have been personal computers, and the people curious enough to figure out what they can do, but Roberts was first with the vision, and that is not something that is in more than a few people.
And I remember seeing that issue, Dave, in your hands around the time the magazine came out. I read it too, but you understood it.
I was still in high school and more interested in shop classes and architecture. Personal computing? Bah, humbug.
Just for grins, I’ll write this for the first time.
My father was interested in computers. Seems the Air Force was putting together a unit to investigate their use back in the late 1940’s. At the initial interview, Dad had laryngitis and did not come off well. He did not get selected for the program and spent the rest of his career otherwise. Still, he maintained an interest in computers.
Our house was filled with “the early computers” being as I recall something from Encyclopedia Brittanica with a bunch of punch cards to do subject searching with. Turned me off computers totally.
Next woke up in the late 80’s with computers at work==connecting to the internet, running spread sheets and interoffice email. Very functional, made sense to me.
Only a few years later did I recognize I had lived through the birth and development of “the personal computer” and I never saw it coming.
Wisdom==coming to terms with how much we have missed. Wisdom==still there for each of us, each and every day.
HEY DAD!!!!—Why did you never share your vision with me? I coulda been a contender.
Thanks Father and NelsonOH for the positive comments.
I worry that I am turning into an an old geezer complaining about “today’s youth”.
But it is important that each generation have some exciting new development like we had with PCs and then the internet.
It’s where American innovation comes from.
My grandfather’s generation innovated with affordable motors, which they used to make clever or silly inventions around the farm.
For my dad it was cheap electronics — he always had some Heathkit or other gizmo he was soldering together. He built this awesome stereo which put off the heat of a toaster oven but sounded fantastic, even by today’s standards.
What is the innovative equivalent of this generation? Social Networking, I guess, but that doesn’t seem the same.
My first computer was an 8088… it belonged to the college we attended and we learned to program on it. It was hooked up to a relay board that we built and used to control a model railroad switching. It had something like 2K of RAM. I mostly remember counting in HEX to figure out codes, and toggle toggle toggle the switches to enter ‘instructions’.
I liked the Teletype with it’s paper tape drive in the other room more, much nicer than the punch cards that we used for our RPG course.
Damn I’m old.
RBG said,
“Still have my Ohio Scientific Superboard II purchased in 1978.”
9 Steve S: I bought mine in 1979 for $350 (with case and P/S). I would have preferred an Apple II but they were over $1000 at the time. The last time I fired up the Ohio Scientific, it still worked!
For a short while I had one of those little Sinclair (Z-80s?) but found the video too finicky. I loved the Superboard & used to program all kinds of elementary video games using the “peek” & “poke” commands. And when I moved from 4K to 8K… The Power! I did purchase a sound kit via Aardvark(?) but it’s lost. I’ll boot up that thing one of these days.
I recall my father-in-law asking, “yeah, but what can you do with it?” “Anything!… just anything!… I had no idea. Computers were just a little all-consuming hobby. Like bobbo, wished I had been more visionary.
RBG
#3 Once the Altair was assembled they would hook up one of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASR-33_Teletype
Display, keyboard and mass storage all rolled up into one unit.
My 8080 system, a Heathkit, consisted of the computer, a terminal (a glass teletype), an audio cassette data storage system, a dual floppy hard-sectored drive unit, a dual floppy soft-sectored drive unit, a NTSC monitor for a graphics/sound card, and an external modem. Each piece of hardware was separately powered.Software consisted of MBasic interpreter, Fortran 80 compiler, M80 Assembler, WordStar, Turbo C compiler, CP/M operating system and similar stuff for the Heath Disk Operating System.
Building the computer was just step one.
First, I believe “Altair” was from the movie “Forbidden Planet”, not Star Trek. But I it’s possible the Enterprise stopped there once. I just don’t recall hearing it mentioned on Star Trek. What episode would that be?
Second, the “Programming Language Interpreter” was probably nothing more than a stripped down version of BASIC. Possibly reverse engineered from Dartmouth’s BASIC. I wonder if Gates and Allen ever paid the college any royalty? I doubt it was very programmable, by any later standards. Like with Gotos, Returns and IF-THEN statements. Just simple math solving functions, if I recall right.
By 1977, I had a programmable handheld Texas Instruments calculator. That cost me about $199. And it probably did more, out of the box, than the Altair did, fully assembled. In fact, I still have the thing. I reverse engineered several HP calculator games to run on it. A year later, I had the Shack’s TRS-80. But only because the Apple 2 was about a $100 more than I could afford. If I’d known how cheesy the Radio Shack computer would be. I would have held out for the Apple. Years later, I got one via a coworker, who repaired them part time. And never touched the TRS-80 again.
The Apple proved a lot more fun to program, since it’s graphics and sound capacity was superior to the TRS-80. It seemed only limited by one’s imagination. Friends loaned me games and other software for it. Some of the games were obviously what costly Arcade machines were running, back then. I saved a ton of quarters, playing Pac Man, Space Invaders, Galaxian, and Donkey Kong, on the Apple 2. So I guess in the long run, it saved me money. Whereas the Shack’s first computer was a dead-end investment. Meant to exploit our naivety.
I had that issue of Popular Electronics, but couldn’t afford the Altair, nor any of the others that came along for some time.
My first was the COSMAC ELF, which was featured in the pages of Radio Electronics magazine. The CPU was made by RCA, of all people! It was all CMOS and completely static; that is, the clock could run at any speed from maximum all the way down to zero. The ELF had a hex keypad instead of a bank of switches, thank goodness! In the Texas summer I used to have to put a baggie with a couple of ice cubes in it on the CPU or the video chip (either one would work) to keep the 32 character by 20 line video from fuzzing out.
Eventually I got the I/O card, the RS-232 ASCII keyboard and the 4K RAM kit. After loading in Tiny BASIC from cassette it had about 400 bytes free! I gotta say, the keyboard was a giant step up from keying in ASCII codes on the hex keypad. The power supply worked great as a battery charger for my Volkswagen Bug, too!
The Tiny BASIC was amazing! It was so limited but it would do things that would be impossible in any self-respecting programming language today. For example, computed GOTOs. You could LET X=(formula) then GOTO X. If there were no X, it would GOTO the next highest number! Or you could skip the last step and just GOTO (formula). To save program memory, I’d key in the values of a bunch of variables in immediate mode before running a program, just so I wouldn’t have to take up scarce space by declaring them in the code. Learning how to call and return from subroutines in the 1802’s machine code was a real adventure!
Ah, memories!
My copy of the 1975 Popular Electronics was donated to the University of New Mexico Centennial Engineering Library. Hopefully no one lifted that copy.
You mean he didn’t buy it from someone else, re-brand it, and sell it as his invention!
“but what could the Altair do with no keyboard, no display? I never understood the point of the Altair other than it being an oversized calculator?”
If I understand the machine, it had switches on the front to set for the binary format input, and LEDs to represent the binary format result, and presumably some way to input your desired function. This would require you to understand binary notation. Didn’t people eventually mate it to keyboards and CRT monitors?
I got into computers as a young teen way back when a old school hacker gave me a copy of Byte magazine. This was in the days when you could buy space war on paper tape, and you punched in hundreds of lines of BASIC from the magazines to run a program. Little did I realize how much that first Byte mag would come to influence the rest of my life… It’s been a long and fun time, and it’s truly amazing how far we’ve come. I look forward to the next 30 years!
The closest today’s kids come to technology immersion is in Robotics ! Check out Make Magazine … PIC Computer chips and stepper motors make the robots go ….
A $2 AVR micro-controller is probably todays closest equivalent. And what young people
should play with to understand what goes on
inside the cpu.
Search for “Triumph of the Nerds” on video sites
to understand Mr Roberts and the other brilliant
people of that time.
Believe it or not, but my first “computer” was a sheet of brown Masonite board, with holes drilled in it. As part of a kit, that supplied wire, light bulbs, a battery holder, screws, 6″ Masonite disks, and brass contact studs. Which acted as connectors between pairs of screws. Thus was simulated various “logic gates” (multi-pole switches) in a crude, manually operated way.
One of the wiring designs supplied was a Tic Tac Toe playing machine. Which never worked right. Many years later, when I went over the diagrams, and discovered it had been drawn up wrong. Simulating the “Stepped Logic” on my TI calculator, it played just fine. The kit maker never issued any addendum. I think the kit cost my father about $100, at the time.
I didn’t get to touch a real computer, until John Hopkins Univ. donated some old tube model, desk cabinet thing, to our local Science Academy. Which offered a programming course, over the summer, for the kids. When it wasn’t broken down, I got a chance to stick pins in placards that created its machine language instructions. Another week, and I’d had that Tic Tac Toe game running. But another breakdown cut the schedule time short. Boohoo.
@Zybch
I first learned of Dr Roberts’ work from the television series “Triumph of the Nerds” which is available on Video google. Why not look it up and find out what everybody is talking about.
Without Dr Roberts there would probably be no modern personal computer industry!
Ed Roberts did much, much more than develop the Altair 8800 microcomputer. He pioneered the personal computer industry with the first newsletter, convention, sales force, software and peripherals that were all targeted at individual customers who wanted to join the computer age. Dr. Roberts even designed what would have become the first laptop computer had Pertec, the firm that bought his company (MITS), followed through. In death he is finally receiving the worldwide recognition he has always deserved.
Forrest M. Mims III