The MITS Altair 8800
by Originally sold as a kit by the American magazine Popular Electronics, the designers wanted to sell only a few hundred units and was surprised when they sold 10 times more that for the first month.
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History
Prologue
When they are, when they served the Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force in New Mexico. Ed Roberts and Forrest M. Mims III decided to use their knowledge to produce electronic kits for models of small rockets. Along with Stan and Robert Zall Cagli, created the MITS (Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) in the garage of Roberts in Albuquerque, New Mexico and began to sell radio transmitters and instruments for a model rocket.
In 1969 Roberts bought the share of other partners and moved to a bigger office, which produced kits of calculators for those who have this hobby. Mims helped write manuals for some of the products in exchange for the kits. In 1972, Texas Instruments developed its own chip to calculate and started selling complete calculators for less than half the price. The MITS was devastated by this, as were many other companies and Roberts struggled to reduce its debt to a quarter of a million dollars.
With the launch of the first 8-bit microprocessor, the Intel 8008 in 1972, and another, more powerful, the 8080 in 1974, began to design various models of microcomputers kits. In July 1974, one of these projects, the well thought-8, Mark Jonathan Titus, based on 8008, was announced in the magazine Radio-Electronics. The design was purely on paper, which requires the builder get the parts one at a time, a task that was basically impossible outside of California. Despite the Mark-8 was not a success, the editors of Popular Electronics that someone thought would be the first supplier of a kit “real” and decided they wanted to do this. At this point the story becomes, somehow, less clear.
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