Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
able informed (and inquisitive) customer base well-prepared to receive the Altair and other
similar machines.
The $400 Altair kit allowed one to build a bare-bones, stripped-down machine. But
with the simple addition of an expansion chassis, slots became available into which nu-
merous cards could be plugged. MITS designed and sold some cards delivering memory,
I/O, etc. Importantly, so did other vendors. As Ceruzzi writes: "Following the tradition es-
tablished by Digital Equipment Corporation, Roberts did not hold specifications of the bus
as a company secret. That allowed others to design and market cards for the Altair. ... So
while it was true that for $400 hobbyists got very little, they could get the rest - or design
and build the rest. Marketing the computer as a bare-bones kit offered a way for thousands
of people to bootstrap their way into the computer age, at a pace that they, not a computer
company, could control."
The first programming language for the machine was Altair BASIC - an interpreter
scaled especially for the Altair by Harvard students Bill Gates and Monte Davidoff together
with Gates' old Seattle friend Paul Allen (at that time a programmer for Honeywell in Bo-
ston). The three did their work running an Intel 8080 simulator on a Harvard DEC PDP-10.
Per Ceruzzi: the ambitious team "wrote not only a BASIC that fit into very little memory;
they wrote a BASIC with lots of features and impressive performance." Most significantly,
unlike previous BASIC interpreters, this one provided a USR (user service routine) with
which programmers could easily switch from BASIC commands to instructions written in
machine language, thus compressing the language so as to make it more useful on small
machines. (This exercise, and the interpreter's adoption by Altair, led in turn to the found-
ing of the firm at first called "Micro Soft." Davidoff - who designed the floating point arith-
metic aspect of the interpreter - did not join Gates when the latter dropped out of Harvard to
start the Micro Soft partnership with Paul Allen. Davidoff did, however, work with Gates at
Microsoft over the course of a couple of summers, creating subsequent improved releases
of what started as Altair BASIC but eventually became known as Microsoft BASIC.)
Hobbyist clubs and mutual user-support groups quickly sprang up arond the Altair. In
what would become known as "Silicon Valley" there emerged the "Homebrew Computer
Club" (founded March 5, 1975 by Lee Felsenstein, who later designed the first Osborne
computer). 25-year-old Hewlett-Packard engineer Steve Wozniak became a regular, attend-
ing meetings which at first were held in a Menlo Park garage.
"The people in Homebrew were a melange of professionals too passionate to leave
computing at their jobs, amateurs transfixed by the possibilities of technology, and techno-
cultural guerrillas devoted to overthrowing an oppressive society in which government,
business, and especially IBM had relegated computers to a despised Priesthood," wrote
Steve Levy in Hackers . "Lee Felsenstein would call them 'a bunch of escapees, at least
temporary escapees from industry, and somehow the bosses weren't watching. And we got
together and started doing things that didn't matter because that wasn't what the big guys
Search WWH ::




Custom Search