How the Personal Computer Was Born

The Smithsonian Institution's "Information Age" exhibit in Washington has long had a section devoted to the early days of personal computing. One of the most prominently displayed early computers in the exhibit is a rare pre-production model of the famous Altair 8800. How that computer got from my Texas office to the Smithsonian Institution is a story worth telling.

The Altair computer sparked the personal when this magazine appeared on newsstands nearly three decades ago. Photograph by Forrest M. Mims III. Click image to enlarge.computing revolution

Twenty-five years ago Popular Electronics magazine featured on its cover a photograph of a build-it-yourself computer called the Altair 8800. An accompanying article by Ed Roberts described how to build the computer. You could even order a complete kit of parts for a little less than $400 from MITS, Inc., Roberts's company in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen were so excited by the Altair that they left Harvard and moved to Albuquerque. There they formed a tiny company called Microsoft and worked alongside Roberts at MITS to develop software for the Altair. It was 1975, and no one then could possibly have imagined that Bill Gates, an 18-year old college dropout who never slept and who always needed a haircut, would one day become the richest man on Earth.

At a time when business computers sold for tens of thousands of dollars, the Altair was a major breakthrough. Roberts and Gates understood that better than anyone else. Yet by today's standards, the Altair was unbelievably primitive. Instead of a keyboard, information was entered into a clumsy row of toggle switches. The Altair's "monitor screen" was a row of flashing red lights. You had to understand the binary number system to know what they meant.

That meant I had to learn binary, for Roberts asked me to write the Altair operator's manual. Since MITS was near bankruptcy, my fee would be one of the first Altairs. That Altair is the one that has been displayed at the Smithsonian for the past dozen or so years. In next week's column, I'll tell that story. But first, I want to tell you more about Ed Roberts and MITS, the company he and I began.

Roberts and I became friends in 1968 when we were assigned to the Air Force's state-of-the-art laser laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Roberts was a second lieutenant who had entered the service as an enlisted man and was commissioned when he received his college degree. I was a first lieutenant just back from a year as an intelligence officer in Vietnam.

While working at the laser lab, Roberts and I had long discussions about our common interests in science and electronics. Roberts used to say that his goals were to earn a million dollars before he reached 30, learn to fly, become a medical doctor and move to a farm in Georgia. Roberts also said that he wanted to design an inexpensive digital computer. None of us then realized that the invention of the computer-on-a-chip known as the microprocessor would eventually allow all of Ed Roberts's dreams to come true.

In 1969 I began writing articles on model rocketry and hobby electronics for various magazines. Being an entrepreneur at heart, Roberts noticed this and wondered if we could form a company to sell kits based on the projects I wrote about. We soon held a meeting in Ed's kitchen with two other guys from the lab, Stan Cagle and Bob Zaller. Within a few weeks we had formed Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems Inc. or simply MITS.

My job was to write magazine articles about how to build and use our products. My wife Minnie Minnie and Robert's wife Joan helped package the kits in blue plastic boxes. Our first product was a tiny light flasher I had designed for tracking and recovering test flights of guided model rockets at night.

The flasher circuit was based on a basic code-practice oscillator from Radio Shack that I had modified to send pulses to an infrared-emitting diode used in a miniature travel aid for the blind that I designed in 1966.

We sold a few hundred light flasher kits, but it soon became obvious that MITS needed a bigger market. So I wrote an article about how to build a device that would transmit your voice over a beam of invisible light. Popular Electronics magazine made the project one of their 1970 cover stories, and we sold a hundred or so kits. With this money we began work on a laser system for hobbyists, which was also published in Popular Electronics. Most of our customers were hobbyists, but we also received orders from universities, corporations and even the FBI,

The kit business eventually reached a break-even point. But MITS needed a product with much more appeal. Next time I'll tell you about that product and how it led directly to the Altair 8800.

Forgotten critics said the Altair was simple and plain. But Bill Gates looked inside and saw an electronic brain. 

Forrest M. Mims III is an independent scientist, writer and photographer.

This feature was originally published in Forrest Mims's weekly science column in the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, Seguin, Texas. The column is written for a general audience.