14 Aug
1998
14 Aug
'98
7:03 a.m.
On 14 Aug 1998, Frank McConnell wrote:
Here's what is significant about MITS and the
Altair 8800:
It arrived on the scene with a price that firmly fixed in lots of
folks' heads the idea that "I can own a computer." And it was
obviously a useful computer that could be expanded to do real work
just like the real computer in the fishbowl at the office, not
something that could only be appreciated through the lights and
switches on its front panel.
Exactly, the Altair helped kick-off the hobbiest movement by being cheap.
The Mark-8 did this earlier, but it was so slow and buggy that it was
pretty much a non-starter. The Altair was an improvement, but it was also
pretty much a non-starter that fizzled after about 10,000 units. The
Altair was the grandfather of the S-100 bus and CP/M, both of which
fizzled and left only a minor mark on MS-DOS, which didn't fizzle.
Low prices, enabled by the microprocessor, is one of the elements that got
us to where we are today. A high-degree of interactivity is another.
Computer graphics is another. The desktop form-factor is also a strong
survivor. So, if somebody were really looking at collecting Altairs as the
machine that "started it all", I think they have been misled and would be
better off collecting the IBM PC, early Apples, early HP desktops, the
PDP-8, and all of the PDP-1's they can find :-)
If they are looking for a machine that heavily influenced the virtually
extinct hobbiest movement and figured prominently in the corporate history
of Microsoft, then they're right on the mark with the Altair 8800.
-- Doug