CHVG: 1975 - Altair the future!

Birth of the micros... (1975)
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PIC: 8800 prototype - not even a working model

In 1975 the MITS company gets an article featured in the January edition of Popular Electronics.  It showcases their new microcomputer which you can order and build from a kit.  And thus begins the personal computer revolution!  For the first time in history you could pay a reasonable price to get all the parts needed to have an actual working computer in your home.  Before this, the only computers were large-scale mainframes and somewhat smaller (but still largish) minicomputers  sold to big corporations and universities.  To own one of those was tens of thousands of dollars, and sometimes had teams of people to keep it working.  But now... a revolution... the impossible was possible... you could own a personal computer - your own machine! No time-sharing with others, no special rights and privileged access accounts... a device you singularily controlled.  The MITS "Altair 8800" changed the face of computing forever.

Kit $397, Assembled $497

The Altair 8800 initially sold in kit form (not even assembled yet) for $397 (somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,300 in 2024 dollars!).  And for that expensive privilege, you'd better be handy with a soldering gun or you run the risk of owning a very expensive doorstop.  In fact, the Altair 8800 was much more of an engineering project than a "computer" in the sense of how we think of it today.  Even if you managed to assemble, troubleshoot, wire and test the Altair successfully... there wasn't much you could do with it.  At least, not yet.  The input & output consisted of a row of LED lights on the front panel.  Flipping switches up & down, you could "program" your Altair - much like entering binary code into a database.  Sound like fun?  For those interested in computer technology it was a dream come true, amazing as that sounds to modern sensibilities!

You "program" it with those up/down switches
They represent bits in an 8-byte register... Whoah!

Even MITS had NO IDEA of how much pent-up demand there was.  The MITS company had been taking a beating with strong competition in their former cash-cow market - calculators.  They had to borrow heavily to get the Altair created and implemented.  It truly was a make or break event for them, and they barely got their prototype computer finished in time for the Popular Mechanics article.  In fact, the original prototype of the Altair got lost in shipping on its way to New York from New Mexico (to this day, it has never been found! Now there's a mystery to unravel).  The picture on the cover of Popular Mechanics wasn't even a real Altair -- they faked it to make the article deadline.  Gutsy move!  But the gamble paid off.  Altair needed to sell at least 600-800 machines to get out of debt and stave off bankruptcy.  After the article came out, the orders started flowing in and they were soon backed up for months with over 4,000 orders in the queue. 

All this when there really wasn't much that could be done with the lowly Altair. The front panel of switches could be used programming the limited 256k of RAM, with a few lights to interpret and read for output.  But the enthusiasm and the possibilities set the hackers to doing what they do best - innovation & improvisation. The S-100 bus on the Altair became a standard feature for implementing add-on products. Within the first year, RAM upgrades became available, Microsoft came up with a BASIC interpreter you could buy and load from paper tape, terminal screens and keyboards could be their own "projects" to expand the usability.  They actually began to make the Altair - well, DO SOMETHING!

Computers became popular items!

With the launch of the Altair came the launch of computer-magazines like BYTE, featuring articles about all kinds of engineering projects, detailed schematics, and do-it-yourself variations of standard accessories.  A marketplace was born and began to grow.  Computer Clubs sprung up in various areas, mainly so that those elite few who were into the computer-scene could freely share tips, learn from each other, and showcase any new & exciting technology they had discovered.  The famous "Homebrew Computer Club" in the San Francisco Bay Area was the fertile grounds from where Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak launched their very first Apple computer. But we're getting a little ahead of the story.

What most people don't really realize is how dynamic and quickly changing even this early computer industry was.  Competition sprang up quickly - and it was fierce.  Kit Computers became the new hot product in technology, and major and minor players sprung up in a general free-for-all of ideas, designs, and features.  Sphere, IMSAI, SWTPC, OSI's Challenger, Sol-20, Jupiter II, Intercolor, Polymorphic, Heathkit, Cromemco, The Digital Group, The Vector-1... need I go on?  Each of these companies put out their own computer, all incompatible with each other and all jockeying for market share and respectability.  It was a fierce, uncharted and unexplored market and no company hit on the "magic formula", they found niche's inside this niche. Some catered to the budget-conscious, others the business market. Some computers focused on a software library, others their higher-end graphics capabilities (still low-res by any modern measurement).

One of many 1st-gen micro computers jostling for market share

Somewhere into the middle of this crazy market of kit computers, Steve Wozniak built his own machine. He combined a video display and various other features into a microcomputer of his own design. Steve says he built what he had always desired to own, but couldn't afford to buy. This is the guy who used to draw computers on paper, sketching out the circuit boards, transistors, and connections. For him, to actually build and finally own a real computer was a dream come true.

In may ways, Steve's homespun computer was better than what you could buy on the market.  He included a keyboard for entry, and a terminal display.  He could type in programs. One of the programs he typed in was his own BASIC language interpreter. Dutifully the Woz could punch in his machine language program (took him about 30-40 minutes) every time he wanted to showcase his creation. Without anyway to save a program yet, once you unplugged to take the computer elsewhere... you'd have to set it up and type it all in again.

In spite of the challenges, Steve Wozniak was happy to hand out the schematics and share his designs with members of the Homebrew Computer Club. It was very much a time of information sharing and learning from each other.  But Steve Jobs saw an opportunity to make The Woz's computer an actual product, and put a stop to Woz's "freebie" tendencies.  But we'll wait until another post soon enough to delve into that chapter of computer history.

1975 - the two Steves

Before I wrap up this post, I want to analyze the videogame industry during this period and its tie-ins with the "kit computer" craze of 1975-1977.  To be fair, I don't think computer games had much of an impact on this era.  Arcade games were not "software-programs" yet, but were hard-wired, solid-state electronics.  In 1975, the shift began when Gun Fight was the first arcade game to use a microprocessor (an Intel 8080).  But bigger video games news in 1975 was the home version of Pong.  This was state-of-the-art home entertainment. While the arcades were exploring other genres like driving and tank games, Pong and its "TV Games" thinking became the major electronic product on the homefront. But again, more on that in another article I hope to post soon.

The influence of games on technology is most definitely felt, if nothing else, in the desire to put pretty pictures on the screens. Computer graphics were mostly limited to text or ASCII characters - so even a bitmapped graphic was an impressive feat at this time.  There were a few standard games that seemed to appear on every system... like Star Trek, David Ahl's BASIC games, puzzles, word play, and also implementations of traditional card & board games.  The graphics on micros were just too limited (if any at all) for much more than these simple games.

However, Pandora's Box had been opened. The Altair was at the forefront of the new micro-computer industry. They might not yet be powerful or highly useful, but they were programmable and multi-purpose.  It felt like a new day was dawning. Soon in this blog we'll take a look at how the strengths of dedicated gaming systems vs. programmable computers each played heavily into the types of games that appeared on the respective systems. And we'll see the constant efforts to improve gaming on both dedicated consoles and the programmable computers.

The IMSAI 8080 - another contendor, especially for business owners.