All Hell Breaks Loose
PROJECT BREAKTHROUGH! World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models…ALTAIR 8800
–Popular Electronics cover, January 1975
Ed Roberts was still worried about his investment even as the first orders came rolling in. But within a week, it was clear that whatever problems MITS would face in the immediate future, bank foreclosure would not be one of them. In just a two-week period, Roberts’s tiny staff had opened hundreds of envelopes and read with giddy excitement orders for all the computers they had ever hoped to sell. Within a month, MITS had gone from one of their bank’s biggest debtors to a fiscal hero. MITS’s bank balance went from $400,000 in the red to $250,000 in the black in a few weeks. Just processing the orders seemed to be a full-time job for everyone.
They Were Buying a Promise
No one had realized just how primed the market was for a personal computer. The January issue of Popular Electronics signaled to thousands of electronics hobbyists, programmers, and other technophiles that the era of the personal computer had finally arrived. Even those who didn’t send in checks saw the Altair article as a sign that they could now have their own computers. The Altair was the fruit of a technological revolution that dropped straight into the hands of a hungry population. They went crazy for it.
Roberts, who had gambled his company’s life on the existence of any market for the machines, was amazed at the magnitude of the response. His experience at selling $99 kit calculators was of little value in predicting the number of buyers for a $397 computer. In addition to the significant price difference, the calculator had a well-defined and obvious function. By comparison, it wasn’t yet clear what the Altair could actually do. Despite Salsberg’s artfully vague promise in Popular Electronics of “manifold uses we cannot even think of at this time,” it was not at all obvious what those “manifold uses” were. That didn’t stop Roberts’s phone from ringing almost nonstop.
Electronic hobbyists were happily buying promises.
Figure 19. The MITS Altair 8800, unassembled Early purchasers of the MITS Altair received a bag of parts and assembly instructions. (Courtesy of David Bunnell)
One of the promises customers bought was delivery in 60 days. Faced with an immediate backlog of orders, Roberts determined that he had to establish priorities or they would never make any deliveries. He issued a no-frills edict: initial production would include only the bare machine. All the bells and whistles, such as extra memory, the clock board, and the interface boards to allow the computer to be connected to a Teletype machine, would have to wait. MITS would ship the box and central processing unit (CPU) board with 256 bytes of memory, the front panel, and nothing else until the backlog was cleared. As delivered, the Altair was no more powerful than the Mark-8. Only its possibilities were greater.
A few orders were filled early in 1975. Garland and Melen, working on Cyclops in the guest bedroom of Melen’s Mountain View, California, apartment, were MITS’s first computer customers. They were not your typical customers. The average order went out only after it inched to the head of the queue, which took time. Garland and Melen received Altair No. 0002 in January. (The first Altair, lost in shipment to New York and never seen again, was unnumbered. Les Solomon got No. 0001.) Garland and Melen immediately set to work on the interface board that would allow the computer to control their Cyclops digital camera.
Despite MITS’s promise of 60-day delivery, orders were not filled in any quantity until the summer of 1975. One hobbyist, Michael Shrayer, who went on to write the first personal-computer word-processing program, described his experience with MITS: “I sent away my $397. Many phone calls later, the computer finally came. It took forever. At that time, I received a big, empty box with a CPU card and 256 bytes of memory. No terminal, no keyboard, nothing. To put anything in it, one had to play with the switches on the front panel and put in minor programs. A lot of peripherals were being promised but not delivered.”
“Minor programs” was a generous description of what you could feed the early Altair. Programs had to be written in 8080 machine language and entered by flipping switches, with one flip of a switch for every binary digit. And once they were entered, the programs could do little except make the lights on the front of the box blink. One of the first programs written for the Altair was a simple game. It caused the lights to blink in a certain pattern, which the player was supposed to mimic by flipping switches.
Figure 20. Steve Dompier He was so eager for a computer of his own that he flew from San Francisco to Albuquerque to check on his Altair order. Here he pays a similar visit to Processor Technology. (Courtesy of Bob Marsh)
The Altair buyer faced another problem after delivery. The computer was sold as a kit, and assembling it took many hours. The odds of the computer eventually working depended on the skill of the hobbyist and the quality of the parts. Most of the first machines simply didn’t work, despite the skill of the user. Steve Dompier, a young building contractor in Berkeley, California, was surprised to find that some of MITS’s advertised equipment didn’t even exist. He recalled sending in a check for $4,000 with a succinct request for “one of everything.” When half his money came back with an apologetic note from a beleaguered MITS secretary saying that they “didn’t have all that stuff yet,” Dompier boarded a plane for Albuquerque.
Flying from San Francisco to Albuquerque over a delay in filling an order for hobby equipment might seem overzealous to some, but not to Dompier. “I wanted to see if they were really there. I rented a car and drove past the place about five times. I was looking for a big building with the letters MITS on it and a front lawn. It turned out it was in a tiny building next to a laundromat in a shopping center. There were two or three rooms. All they had was a box full of parts.” He picked up some of those parts and returned to San Francisco.
On April 16, 1975, Dompier reported on MITS at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, a pioneering microcomputer club in Menlo Park, California. Dompier drew an attentive audience. MITS, he told his listeners, had 4,000 orders and couldn’t even begin to fill them. The thousands of orders, more than anything else, sparked people’s interest. What they had been waiting for had happened. They were going to have their own computers.
But calling the Altair a computer took some imagination. By mid-1975, when MITS was delivering product on a regular basis, the assembled machine was no more than a metal box containing a power-supply unit bolted next to a large circuit board. This board was called the motherboard because it was the main piece of circuitry in the machine. It contained 100 strands of gold that connected the motherboard to 18 slots into which other circuit boards could be plugged.
Those 18 slots were a symbol of both the Altair’s expandability and an owner’s frustration at not being able to use most of them. Regardless of whatever a customer may have ordered, what was shipped was a machine with only two of the slots filled. One slot would have a board containing the CPU (basically, the Intel 8080 chip and supporting circuitry), and the other slot would have a board that contained 256 bytes of memory.
The Altair package also included a front-panel board that controlled the lights and switches on the front of the box. These lights and switches were the I/O, the means by which users communicated with the machine. It was up to the customer to attach the front-panel board to the motherboard by hooking up dozens of wires—a task requiring hours of tedious work. But these three boards, comprising a CPU, some memory, and an I/O unit, meant that the early Altair—barely—met the minimal definition of a computer.
Maybe all that the Altair could do was blink its lights, but for the Homebrew members just the fact that it existed was enough for them. They would take it from there.
“They made the business happen,” semiconductor designer Chuck Peddle said of these early hobbyists. “They bought computers when they didn’t work and when there was no software for them. They created a market, and then they turned around and wrote the programs that brought other people in.”
The early purchasers of the Altair had no choice but to write their own programs. MITS initially supplied no significant software with the machine. The typical response of a computer hobbyist to the Popular Electronics article was to first send for an Altair, and when it arrived (and had been successfully assembled) begin writing software for it.
Enter Gates and Allen
Two programmers in Boston decided to skip Step One.
Paul Allen was working for Honeywell in Boston. Bill Gates was a freshman at Harvard, where he had customized a curriculum that allowed him to take graduate mathematics courses. On weekends the two would get together to brainstorm about the microcomputers they just knew were coming, and these microprocessors that would surely power them. “We were just trying to figure out something we could do with them,” Allen recalled. Gates and Allen sent out offers on their old Traf-O-Data stationery to write implementations of PL/I (Programming Language One) for $20,000. They also considered selling Traf-O-Data machines to a company in Brazil. In the middle of a Boston winter, they were spinning their wheels.
While walking through Harvard Square one day, Allen spotted the Popular Electronics cover that featured the Altair. Like many other computer enthusiasts, he realized at once that the Altair was a tremendous breakthrough. But he also saw it as something of personal interest. Allen ran to tell Bill that he thought their big break had finally come. Bill agreed.
“So we called this guy Ed Roberts,” Gates recalled. “We had a fairly aggressive posture. We said, ‘We have a BASIC. Do you want it?’” In 1975, Allen and Gates were pioneers in the industry practice of preannouncing products that didn’t yet exist. Later, this type of thing would come to be called “vaporware.”
Roberts was justly skeptical. He had heard from many programmers who claimed they could write software for his computer. He told Gates and Allen what he told everyone else: he would buy the first BASIC he saw actually running on an Altair.
Unlike the others, Gates and Allen delivered. About six weeks later Allen flew to Albuquerque to show Roberts their BASIC. The demonstration was a success even though their BASIC initially did little more than announce its presence. The Traf-O-Data company, newly renamed Micro-Soft (later changed to Microsoft) had made its first sale as a microcomputer software house.
In March, Roberts offered Paul Allen the position of director of software at MITS. Frustrated at Honeywell and eager to work in what he saw as a tremendously promising field, Allen accepted immediately and flew to Albuquerque with all the cash he and Gates could lay their hands on. The title of MITS software director, as it turned out, was not quite the illustrious post Allen had imagined. Upon arriving in Albuquerque, he discovered that he was the software department.
Figure 21. MITS Altair ad David Bunnell wrote the copy for this early Altair ad, which ran in Popular Electronics and Scientific American. (Courtesy of David Bunnell)