Forrest M. Mims III

T hirty years ago this month Popular Electronics magazine featured on the cover of its January 1975 issue a photograph of the first Altair 8800 microcomputer. An article by H. Edward Roberts described how to build the computer from a kit sold by his company, MITS, Inc., in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ed and I had founded the company with Stan Cagle and Bob Zaller several years earlier, and I wrote the Altair operator's manual in exchange for one of the first Altairs.

A young student at Harvard was excited by the arrival of the Altair article in Popular Electronics. His name was Bill Gates. He and Paul Allen quickly developed a version of BASIC for the Altair.

Within a few months, Gates and Allen moved to Albuquerque and set up their new business at MITS a few blocks from where I lived. They named their new company Microsoft.

The year was 1975. We soon learned that the Altair had inspired a computing revolution. But none of us had any idea that Paul Allen and Bill Gates, an 18-year old former college student who never seemed to sleep, would one day become the richest men on Earth.

The Altair arrived on the scene more than a year before any of its competitors. Business computers sold for tens of thousands of dollars and were the size of office file cabinets. The kit version of the Altair sold for only $395, but it lacked the sophistication of the business computers. Over the next few years, personal computers became more sophisticated and eventually took over the market.

Recently Allen and Gates gave a substantial grant to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science for a gallery dedicated to the history of the personal computer. In 1986 I donated my Altair to the Smithsonian Institution, and it has been on display there for 14 years. There is a good chance that the Smithsonian Institution will loan that Altair to the new exhibit.

Two years ago Paul Allen arranged for a film crew to record long interviews with the people involved with the Altair. So maybe there will be more to tell about this story a few years down the road. For more about the history of the personal computer, visit my web site or go to The Citizen Scientist and search on “altair.”