Using a soldering iron and a kit of components, for around $439 you could build your Issues of Popular Electronics magazine, designed by a fellow called Ed Roberts. The Altair sprang to life as a construction project in the January and February 1975 It works just like a real Altair,Īnd runs at the correct 2Mhz clock speed. Volatile memory, and a functioning Intel 8080 processor. Here is a faithful simulation of a MITS Altair, complete with fan noise, switch clicks, You can still find Altairs in museums, and some lucky individuals still have their machines. Really work that puts you in an elite echelon. If you can write even the simplest of programs on an Altair, then you have a level of insight into how computers Programming the Altair was programming the bare metal - no operating system. These days many professional programmers do not understand computers from the bottom to the top,īecause they've always worked in high-level languages and made use of extensively layered software.
The wonderful thing about learning to code on an Altair meant there was nowhere for the magic to hide. Now everybody has a computer in their pocket.īut it all started with the Altair, and Bill Gates (sometimes Richest Guy on Earth) got his first big break on the Altair. The MITS Altair is widely accepted to be the computer that first kicked off the personal computer age.īefore the MITS Altair, owning a computer was not something individuals did.