Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Hobbyists, Microsoft and DOS
"At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to
belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers
and all that stuff."
- Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple
In April of 1972, Intel announced a chip called the 8008, which could handle data in 8-bit
chunks. Two years later, the firm announced the 8080, capable of addressing much more
memory while at the same time needing fewer support chips. As would become a trend, the
8080 was configured so as to make programs designed for the 8008 upwardly compatible.
The March 1974 issue of
QST
- catering to amateur builders of radios - carried an ad for
a kit to build a small computer called the
Scelbi-8H
. This machine used an 8008 chip and
had pricing that started at $440. Two months later the magazine
Radio-Electronics
offered
for $5 the plans to build another 8008-based machine: a "personal minicomputer" called the
Mark-8
. These plans included referrals to firms where would-be builders could buy circuit
boards ($47.50) and 8008 chips ($120.00). Six months on down the road, in January of 1975,
Popular Electronics
offered the kit for H. Edward Roberts' Altair computer, which could be
assembled for just under $400.
Working out of a garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Roberts had co-founded Micro
Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in 1969. The firm's Altair signaled a real
revolution, because the Altair, centered on an Intel 8080 microprocessor, was the real deal:
an actual personal computer. Many consider the introduction of the Altair as an event of
equivalent importance to IBM's introduction of the System/360 in the previous decade. This
machine, per the article in
Popular Electronics
, was "a full-blown computer that can hold its
own against sophisticated minicomputers ... not a 'demonstrator' or a souped-up calculator."
The Altair offered "[performance that competes] with current commercial minicomputers,"
the latter being priced, on average, ten times higher than the Altair.
The Altair's computer bus was to become a
de facto
standard in the form of the S-100
bus.
Roberts had expected to sell about two hundred Altair kits, even though he'd given his
financial backers an optimistic forecast of 800. Instead he sold thousands.
The introduction of the Altair 8800 happened at just the right moment. For more than
ten years, colleges had required students majoring in science and engineering to take at
least one course in computer programming. Most of these courses involved either learning
FORTRAN or BASIC (the latter being "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,"
originally designed at Dartmouth as a teaching tool). This in turn led to the creation of a siz-
