Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

https://www.goto10retro.com/p/altair-at-50-remembering-the-first

by rbanffy • 1 year ago

111 60 1 year ago

goto10retro.com

berlinbrowndev• 1 year ago

Cool I always thought the first PCs were like the TRS or Commodore 64 computers.

rbanffy11• 1 year ago

There is some controversy - you could actually use a TRS-80, an Apple II or a PET right after taking it out of the box.

I think that, if we define a personal computer as a machine that is designed for a single interactive user, the LGP-30 would be a good candidate. It was not, however, a home computer.

For me, a personal computer needs more than switches and LEDs as its UI. With a serial port, a terminal, and a monitor program in ROM, the Altair would qualify.

anthk• 1 year ago

TRS-80, AII and the PET came later. You were right on the peripherals. Instead of a serial port, I'd set a TV output with a keyboard as an input, and the Altair would get far more sales.

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

Did it not have a serial port? Would have assumed that connecting it to a terminal or teletype was the standard thing.

dowager_dan993• 1 year ago

keep the historical context in mind. There were people who wanted a computer at home and people who wanted to bring home the experience they got with access to powerful mainframe & minicomputers at work or school, so there was both a push to build your own computer and a desire to build IO devices like teletypes. The combo, all-in-one is the real revolution (IMO) that you got with the Apple II or the Sol. The TRS-80s and PETs feel a lot more like early commercialization in comparison. Woz was motivated by showing off what he could create, because that's how he communicated. It makes sense that a keyboard and TV - with graphics - shows off way better, same with being able to program in basic "... for $300 you can build a computer that's so good you can type programs on it and run them..."

Pet_Ant• 1 year ago

You might want to look at the Sol-20, Micral N, and Kenbak-1 as well. From 1971, the Kenbak was a _personal_ computer, but not a personal _micro_ computer.

The Wang 2200 looks most like we'd expect a personal computer to look like, but the price range was not home-friendly (~$50k today).

rbanffy11• 1 year ago

If we draw the line at “home computer” we can give Honeywell the crown, even though I doubt even a single one was actually used as a “kitchen computer”

chasil• 1 year ago

The Intel line was fathered by the Datapoint 2200; they implemented the CPU in TTL logic boards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200

The 6502 line came out Motorola's failure to "indulge" their employees in a low-cost 6800, thus unintentionally fathering MOS Technologies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502

The 6502 was extremely inexpensive. The first implementation was the KIM-1, so this is the first on that side.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1

mixmastamyk• 1 year ago

Commodore had the PET in the late 70's, and the Vic-20 before the 64 in the early 80s.

Apple had the II in the late 70s, and before that was the Altair.

rahen• 1 year ago

"Personal computer" can refer either to a small-form computer, in which case the Olivetti P101 was likely the first in 1965 (the PDP-8/E was also a contender), or to a microprocessor-based computer, in which case the Micral N holds that title in 1973.

The Altair, in 1975, was the first commercially successful personal microcomputer.

igtztorrero• 1 year ago

The Altair didn’t survive for very long, but essentially being responsible for the creation of Microsoft is a pretty Big Deal.

Bill Gates: "Popular Electronics" magazine cover of January 1975 change my life"

Paul Allen write the simulator on Harvard PDP-10, Bill Gates write main code of Basic, Monte Davidoff write Math package. They coded day and night during 2 months.

Micro-Soft was born.

JSR_FDED• 1 year ago

Similarly it inspired the start of Apple!

rbanffy11• 1 year ago

Apple got a couple things right - the II had a keyboard, TV output with graphics, and plug-and-play slots (no fiddling with jumpers and dip switches like s-100 and PCs): each card had a well defined space for IO and ROM.

reaperducer2• 1 year ago

Altair didn’t survive for very long,

The company sold itself to Pertec for what was a very good amount of money back then.

In HN terms, it was a successful unicorn bro exit.

dowager_dan993• 1 year ago

and if I remember it correctly Roberts used the money to buy a peanut farm? Is that equivalent to a tech bro buying the coast of California or an island?

dowager_dan993• 1 year ago

and the fact that MITS couldn't keep up with demand gave birth (IMO) to the 3rd party (licensed and unofficial) peripherals ecosystem.

canucker2016• 1 year ago

From Paul Allen's Idea Man autobiography, he wrote that he had written an Intel 8008 emulator/assembler on PDP-10 for their Traf-O-Data company.

So adapting the Intel 8008 emulator/assembler to the Intel 8080 was easy, compared to starting from scratch (and wondering if it was even possible that writing an 8080 cross-assembler/emulator would work).

Monte Davidoff has written a math package for PDP-8 so he was hired to write the math package for their BASIC for $400 + more in consulting fees.

Both the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 were introduced at $360 - many references to the IBM 360 mainframe computers as the inspiration for this price.

Ed Roberts was able to negotiate thousand Intel 8080 CPUs at $75 (vs $360 list price). A retro computing website mentions that these CPUs were less than perfect somehow, though still functional.

Back to Paul Allen's book, the MITS Altair was originally introduced with a whole 256 bytes of memory. To increase profits, the included memory card was ditched and you had to buy a memory card ($176 or 1K or $264 for 4K - amazon.com sells DDR5 64GB for US$150-$200 today)

    When Intel and Texas Instruments ran short of memory chips, Ed turned to an off-brand called Signetics, whose chips were hopelessly flaky. I started getting calls, less friendly this time, from people who’d invested in 4K of memory and still couldn’t load BASIC. I’d see Bill Yates tearing his hair out in the engineering department over defective Signetics cards. As David Bunnell and Eddie Currie later acknowledged in PC Magazine, “. . . the probability of getting a 4K memory board to work when assembled from [an Altair] kit was remote. And the likelihood that it would continue to work would easily have been rated zero.”

shakna• 1 year ago

I was completely distracted by the magazine cover. The calculator being advertised there, and the wording, caught my attention.

The magazine issued is available here [0].

Apparently, it really was wiring up an entire calculator.

... Start assembly by installing and soldering into place the fixed resistors. Then proceed to installing the three electrolytic capacitors, the diodes, and the transistors, taking care to observe proper polarity and basing. Mount the transistors close to the board’s surface...

[0] https://archive.org/details/197501PopularElectronics

hvs• 1 year ago

Until microcomputer boom of the 70's and 80's there was the calculator boom of the early 70's. The availability of the microprocessor made small calculators widely available for the first time and they were very popular among the type of people that probably would've read Hacker News had it existed.

Sharlin3• 1 year ago

What caught my eye was the headline about CCDs as successors to video camera tubes. Charge-coupled devices being, of course, the sensor technology now used by essentially all of the billions of digital cameras on the planet.

MBCook• 1 year ago

Hasn’t basically everyone switch from CCD to CMOS sensors these days?

I don’t know the technical difference other than what each stands for.

danbruc• 1 year ago

Cost the equivalent of $2359 back then, right now you can get a few on eBay for around $5000. Or you can get a mini replica kit for $150. [1]

[1] https://altairmini.com/en/home

twoodfin• 1 year ago

Lest you worry you (or your parents) should have stashed away a few Altairs, that $397 in a tax-advantaged retirement account investing in the S&P 500 would be worth more than $70k today.

NoSalt• 1 year ago

Wow ... the man who invented it, Ed Roberts, had quite the life:

  • Air Force enlisted

  • Air Force comissioned

  • Electrical Engineer

  • Computer inventor

  • "Gentleman" farmer

  • Medical doctor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computer_engineer)

pipes• 1 year ago

Bill Gates goes into this in his autobiography, source code. Paints a very positive picture of him.

embedded_hiker• 1 year ago

My school library ( 6th - 8th grades ) had this magazine, and they had a 9-week class on programming in BASIC using a 110 bps teletype connected to an HP2000C that was shared by several school districts. That was my start in all of this. I didn't get my own computer until the C64 price dropped to $200 in 1983.

rbanffy11• 1 year ago

Nothing beats the sound of a 110 bps teletype. I loved the humming.

CarVac• 1 year ago

My dad has an IMSAI 8080 which is a neat piece of hardware. It still works, though a few LEDs failed.

Unfortunately for him, in university one of his professors advised him not to go into computers for a career...

kabdib• 1 year ago

in 1977 or so my dad (a college professor) advised me not to go into computers

a couple of decades later (i hadn't listened, and had been working for high-tech Silly Valley for quite a while) he apologized :-)

rbanffy11• 1 year ago

I was torn between music and engineering. I would be poorer, but the parties would have been much better.

jodydonetti• 1 year ago

Olivetti P101 (1965)

https://www.fondazioneadrianolivetti.it/en/p101-cecam/

pan69• 1 year ago

It's an interesting one. Some people call it a Personal Computer others call it a calculator. However you classify it, it was certainly a interesting and important stepping stone and it's a shame that a lot of European innovations are often forgotten or skimmed over:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_101

mrcwinn• 1 year ago

For those interested in Ed Roberts, refer to Robert Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds," in particular Volume 1.

downut• 1 year ago

I cannot find it but I think for about a decade the music cart rotation at WREK was powered by a student built automation system on an Altair. Don't remember any faults in the years I was around it.

(I was a music director at WREK in the early '80s)

rbanffy11• 1 year ago

Wow! Did you take any photos?

vondur• 1 year ago

I had one from my father in law. Donated it a local university where they had it displayed in the lobby for quite some time.

dcassett• 1 year ago

The article didn't mention the Mark-8 "kit" featured in the July 1974 issue of Radio-Electronics [1]. My dad built the Mark-8 that year and showed me how he could play the Star-Spangled Banner on the AM radio by taking advantage of the RFI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-8

oldnetguy• 1 year ago

The Kenbak 1 is the first personal computer

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/personal-computer...

rbanffy11• 1 year ago

Nonsense! It was the LGP-30!

(It all depends on the definition or what a personal computer is)

musicale• 1 year ago

There seem to be many (!) emulators for it.

https://www.s2js.com/altair/

http://altair32.classiccmp.org

https://github.com/simh/simh/blob/master/ALTAIR/altair.txt

https://github.com/njbigwig/AltairEmulator

https://github.com/gloveboxes/AltairEverywhere

etc.

Of course you can run CP/M on it, but then it works like any other CP/M machine (and probably less conveniently than CP/M emulators which are integrated with the underlying host filesystem.)

Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

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