- The Altair 8800. Photo by “euthman”. Click image for more
The Altair 8800, one of the first microcomputers to be available to home hobbyists in a “build it yourself” kit. The Altair 8800 changed the way computers were thought about, and helped to bring computers from the commercial world into homes. Read more to learn about it.
From Wikipedia:
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“The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975 based on the Intel 8080 CPU and sold by mail order through advertisements in Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist magazines. The designers hoped to sell only a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were surprised when they sold thousands in the first month.[1] The Altair also appealed to individuals and businesses who just wanted a computer and purchased the assembled version.[2] Today the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that led to the microcomputer revolution of the next few years: The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft‘s founding product, Altair BASIC.[3][4]”
Altair 8800. (2011, June 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:16, June 29, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Altair_8800&oldid=432517909
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