After Altair
Everybody wanted to be second.
–Ted Nelson, computer visionary, philosopher, and critic
During the two and a half years between the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover story announcing the Altair 8800 and the May 1977 sale of MITS to Pertec, a new industry was on the rise. The Altair announcement triggered both technological and social change. The hobbyists who read the Popular Electronics article may not have envisioned the subsequent proliferation of microcomputers, but they did realize they were witness to the start of a radical change in the way people accessed computers. They had been longing for it.
Programmers, technicians, and engineers who worked with large computers all had the feeling of being locked out of the machine room. They resented the tyranny of the priesthood and dreamed of owning their own machines.
Hobbyist Entrepreneurs
The Altair from MITS breached the machine-room door, and rivals emerged almost all at once from garages all over the country. Ed Roberts’s price was hard to undercut, and if it had not been for the long delays in delivering the Altair, MITS’s early advantage would have been huge. But none of these hobbyist entrepreneurs was in it primarily for the money. When they failed, and they often did, they failed openly, with their schematics laid on the table for all to see. Mistakes proved instructive, and failures did little to discourage increased innovation. The revolution was running on its own internal drive, and not according to the external pull of profits. As a result, the industry did not take shape according to traditional economic laws.
The MITS competitors were hobbyist enterprises, partly because none of the big corporations wanted to build microcomputers. Only those fanatics who were totally and blindly enthralled by computers and electronics could have endured the tedious detail work required to design and build a computer by hand.
The idea of assembling a computer by hand sounded crazy to most people. It had only recently become possible to attempt such a task at all, and the Altair had yet to prove itself as a computer in anything more than the technical sense. But the hobbyists of 1975 knew that the Altair eventually would make its mark.
Don Lancaster, of TV Typewriter fame, had been providing digital know-how to a generation of computer hobbyists through his freelance articles in electronics magazines. Lancaster became involved with a company called Southwest Technical Products in the mid-1970s. Southwest Tech made high-end audio components kits and in 1975 released an Altair-like microcomputer using a new microprocessor from Motorola, the 6800. Many engineers, including Ed Roberts, thought the 6800 was a better chip than the Altair 8080, and Roberts kept a watchful eye on Southwest Tech.
Don Lancaster exemplified the spirit of information sharing, unthinkable among most other business competitors, that ran throughout the computer-hobbyist field. Special-interest magazines had helped create a nationwide community of hobbyists who regularly wrote to one another, argued at length and with passion, and generously shared their knowledge. As a result, they were technically prepared and emotionally geared up to build their own computers. “They wanted it so bad they could taste it,” said semiconductor designer Chuck Peddle.
Some of the Players
At UC Berkeley, computer-science professor John Torode examined the Intel 4004 and 8008 chips and decided they were less than ideal for use as central processors. When he got one of the first 8080 chips from his old friend Gary Kildall, who was teaching computer science down the coast in Monterey and consulting at Intel, Torode began to think seriously about building his own microcomputer.
By mid-1974, Torode and Kildall had assembled a microcomputer and a disk operating system of sorts. But they were skeptical about the market for such a device and continued to refine the product strictly as a hobby; Kildall created the software and Torode fashioned the hardware. They sold only a handful of machines before the Altair burst on the scene, including the two devices they sold to a San Francisco Bay Area computer-terminal company called Omron. The two then pursued their interests independently; Torode built computers under the name Digital Systems and later Digital Microsystems, and Kildall wrote software under the name Intergalactic Digital Research (later just Digital Research).
Although the Bay Area was recognized as a development hub, the microcomputer phenomenon was spreading nationwide. In Denver, Robert “Dr. Bob” Suding turned his hobby into a business, Digital Group, which soon won the respect of many hobbyist customers. The company initially produced plug-in circuit boards for the Altair and other emerging computer brands. Suding also pioneered an idea that was taken seriously five years later: a machine that could use different types of microprocessors interchangeably. The Altair was an 8080 machine and the Southwest Tech computer a 6800, but either processor would work in a Digital Group computer.
This innovation reflected the thinking of the times. An interchangeable microprocessor was a boon to microcomputer designers (that is, hobbyists), but was of little use to ordinary consumers because of the lack of software for the new processors. The hobbyists were designing computers for themselves. Even the appearance of the machines reflected their hobbyist origins. The typical computer resembled a homemade piece of electronic test equipment—a metal box rigged with toggle switches, blinking lights, and wires running out of its back, front, top, or sides—a real “kludge.”
No one gave much thought to a machine’s visual appeal because designers were creating the computers they wanted, regardless of how the end product looked. When the Southern California–based company Vector Graphic rejected a designer’s pink circuit board with purple rheostats on the grounds that the components clashed with Vector’s green-and-orange computer, the designer was flabbergasted. Color coordination was seldom a consideration in mid-1970s computer design.
One of the first computer companies to consciously consider aesthetic appeal and economical use of desktop space was Sphere, founded by Mike Wise in Bountiful, Utah. This was the company that, like MITS, had promoted its computers with a traveling show run out of a motorhome. The Sphere computer was integrated; that is, the display monitor and keyboard were incorporated into the same case with the microprocessor. The machine was a closed unit, with no mass of wires dangling out of its sides.
The Sphere didn’t last. Although a commercial product on the outside, inside it was all hobby machine. The mechanism under the lid wasn’t pretty—not even to a hobbyist. It was too much of a handmade item, filled with scores of crisscrossing, hand-soldered wires. The Sphere was not engineered for production, nor was it particularly reliable. Plus, as one hobbyist of the time put it, it had “the world’s slowest BASIC.”
The names given to the corporate start-ups reflected the informality and tongue-in-cheek humor of the hobbyist movement. Lee Felsenstein started a company called Loving Grace Cybernetics and later another called Golemics Incorporated. Ted Nelson’s Itty-Bitty Machine Company, a sly play on IBM, appeared in Evanston, Illinois. Chicken Delight Computer Consultants cropped up in New Jersey. Kentucky Fried Computers began in Northern California.
A thin line existed between buyers and manufacturers in those early days. Operating a microcomputer took so much expertise and dedication that to say a skilled user could have become a manufacturer was no exaggeration. The “industry” consisted of a conglomerate subculture of technofreaks, hobbyists, and hackers untrained in business practices, entrepreneurs who were more interested in exploring the potential of the microcomputer than in making a fortune.
One exception was IMSAI Manufacturing in San Leandro, California.
IMSAI
IMSAI became the number-two maker of microcomputers and soon thereafter seized the leading sales position from MITS. Started by Bill Millard just months after the January 1975 Altair debut, IMSAI was unique in its origin and philosophy. Practically all the other company presidents were hobbyists who knew each other through club meetings and newsletters. Millard, by comparison, was a former sales representative. He and his associates didn’t know the hobbyists and didn’t want to know them. They seldom attended the hobbyists’ club meetings at which members would swap stories of their experiences with various new (and unreliable) machines, exchange rumors, and share equipment, software, and insights. Millard and company didn’t consider themselves part of that crowd.
From the very first, Millard and his team of hard-driving executives saw themselves as serious businesspeople in a field populated by blue-jeaned dilettantes. The IMSAI computer would be the desktop tool of the small business, Millard decreed. It would, among other things, replace the typewriter. In the minds of IMSAI executives, the company was building commercial systems for business customers who wanted to do real work. They weren’t in the business of making toys for hobbyists. It was prescient on their part to see such potential in those crude early microcomputers. It may have seemed fanciful to build a company on that vision back in 1975, but Millard and his team were not afraid to be seen as overly ambitious. They were operating outside the envelope, and that was how they liked it.
In 1975, when IMSAI began making its 8080 microcomputer, most of the hobbyists thought that Millard was trying to corner the business market a little early. The hard-core hobbyists didn’t know just yet what those machines could do, so how could the business community be expected to embrace them? Microcomputers were still experimental and often didn’t work right. So what made Millard and his team think that small businesses would buy the machines?
“Guesswork,” according to cofounder Bruce Van Natta. “We guessed that these things were really small business machines, even if the damn things did weight 80 pounds and barely fit on a desk.”
Technologically, the IMSAI computer was no breakthrough. It was essentially a copy of the Altair with some enhancements—most notably, a better power supply. The Altair’s power-supply unit, which was supposed to distribute the appropriate DC current and voltages to the various parts of the computer, was regarded by hobbyists as dismal. IMSAI, on the other hand, delivered “a power supply you couldn’t lift,” as Van Natta put it. Although IMSAI eventually solved other stubborn technical problems, perhaps the company’s most significant achievements in hardware design were improving the Altair power supply and eliminating the hand-soldered wires that the Altair required. Those two innovations went a long way toward making the machines truly useful.
But IMSAI’s most important contribution to the nascent industry was not a technological one; it was the company’s pure chutzpah. Millard took a “me-too” design, sold it to a market whose mere existence was dubious, and built a company that became a power to be reckoned with.