Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

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

It’s kind of funny CCDs had a full product life cycle since that magazine cover.

Nonsense! It was the LGP-30!

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

Wow! Did you take any photos?

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.”