The Birth of the Personal Computer Era

Forrest M. Mims III

My wife Minnie and I are driving along IH-10 headed back to Texas after attending the opening of STARTUP, a new gallery at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. STARTUP is dedicated to the founding of the personal computer era, which began in Albuquerque, not Silicon Valley. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is the major backer of the STARTUP Gallery. Additional funding was provided by Intel, various other sources and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

These words are being typed into a small laptop computer while Minnie takes a turn at the wheel. A computer like this one was unheard of in January 1975 when a bombshell of a magazine article appeared on newsstands. The article in Popular Electronics magazine described how to build the Altair 8800, a computer kit that cost only $395. The kit was developed by Ed Roberts, president of MITS, an electronics company that Roberts and I had founded with Bob Zaller and Stan Cagle in 1969.

Back then we sold light flashers and other gadgets I designed to fly in model rockets. These products paid back little more than our expenses, so we developed a light-wave communicator that was featured on the cover of Popular Electronics. We also developed the first laser diode project. These projects were reasonably novel, but they made little money.

Eventually I left MITS to become a science and electronics writer while writing manuals for MITS on the side. Ed Roberts went on to develop several lines of calculators. This became a highly competitive business, and Ed was close to bankruptcy when he developed the Altair 8800 that saved his company and captured worldwide attention.

In 1975, personal computers were only a dream. There were no PCs or Macintoshes. Articles like this were prepared on typewriters. Photographs were processed using chemicals. There was no e-mail or World Wide Web.

Thousands of computer savvy hobbyists, students and engineers were eagerly waiting for the day when affordable computers would rest on their desktops. They included Paul Allen, a young Honeywell computer programmer, and his childhood friend, Bill Gates, a Harvard University student. When Allen saw the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics with the MITS Altair 8800 computer on the cover, he bought the magazine and quickly showed it to Gates. Both men realized that the computer revolution was about to begin without them. Allen and Gates knew that the new computer would be useless without software. So they called Ed Roberts and said they had developed a version of the BASIC computer language that would work with the Altair. Roberts expressed interest, so Allen and Gates immediately began work developing the software for a computer they didn't even have.

Back in Albuquerque Roberts was being flooded with orders for the Altair, and I was writing the operator's manual. When Allen flew to Albuquerque with the BASIC software he and Gates had hurriedly cobbled together, Roberts picked him up at the airport in his pickup and drove him to MITS. The first attempt to use the new software was only partially successful. That night Allen fixed the problem, and the next morning the software worked perfectly.

Roberts hired Allen, who eventually persuaded Gates to drop out of Harvard and join him. They soon founded a 2-man company they called Micro-Soft. The transformation of this unknown software company into Microsoft is part of the story told in the STARTUP Gallery. The story is illustrated through video clips of Roberts, Allen, Gates and other computer pioneers, rare artifacts, computer displays and a unique 11-minute video production. The exhibits include a rare Apple 1, the first Xerox mouse and sections of some of the first digital computers.

If you have ever wondered about the origins of the personal computer era, STARTUP is well worth a visit. Until you can get to Albuquerque , you can get a preview of the gallery at www.startupgallery.org and at my web site.

Forrest M. Mims III and his science are featured online at www.forrestmims.org and www.sunandsky.org.