The Altair 8800 computer is generally considered to be the first commercially-viable home computer.
"Museum Pieces" is a diary series that explores the history behind some of the most interesting museum exhibits and historical places.
In the early 1980s, computer techie George Keremedjiev was running a small consulting firm in New Jersey when he was hired to streamline the computer systems at a metal-working plant in Florida.
During one of his breaks there, Keremedjiev was browsing in a nearby antique shop when he happened to see an old Brunsviga mechanical calculating machine which had been mistakenly labeled as a “check writer”. He purchased the Brunsviga and brought it home with him.
That sparked an interest in obtaining and preserving the artifacts of machine history, and it became the first of what quickly turned into a large and rapidly-growing collection of old electronic devices. By 1990, Keremedjiev's collection was large and varied enough to form the core of a small nonprofit museum, and the American Electronic and Robotics Museum opened in Bozeman MT after Keremedjiev moved there from Princeton.
Since then, the collection has continued to grow, and in 1994 the fledgling exhibit won the Society of Technology History's “Dibner Award” for Excellence in Museum Exhibits. By 1997 the Museum was handing out its own annual award, the George R Stibitz Computer and Communications Award, named after a pioneer who produced the Model K binary adding machine in the 1930s. This was followed in 2009 by the Edward O Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Award, which was named after an influential environmentalist, author, and entomologist. George Keremedjiev died in 2018, but the Museum continues to be run by his wife Barbara.
The Museum's exhibits span a period of some 4000 years. One gallery features examples of clay tablets from the Middle East containing the earliest known writing system, cuneiform, which dates to around 1850 BCE and made up the first artificial “information transfer system”. Also on exhibit is a replica of the ancient Antikythera Device, which is believed to be an astronomical calculator and dates from around 80 BCE, making it the oldest known geared mechanical object.
There is a WW2 German Enigma cipher machine on display along with a number of exhibits featuring early computers like the Bomba that were used to decipher it, and later mainframe computers like the ENIAC, UNIVAC, PDP and various IBM models. NASA has loaned a variety of electronics pieces from the US space program, including an Apollo Guidance Computer and a ground-based UNIVAC-418II mainframe used for astronomical calculations. There is also a military display with a Minuteman nuclear missile guidance module. In addition, the Museum has a collection of computerized industrial machinery, including early electronic calculators and some computer-numerically-controlled milling machines and robotic arms.
One of the most interesting displays, however, traces the history of the personal desktop computer. And this begins with the Altair 8800.
In 1974, the then-tiny Intel Company had begun producing microprocessor chips that were more powerful yet cheaper than anything that had come before. That caught the attention of a small network of early computer geeks, many of them in California, who saw these chips as a way to produce tiny homemade versions of the big expensive IBM mainframes they were already experimenting with.
One of the various magazines that catered to these hobbyists was Popular Electronics, and editor Arthur Salsberg looked around for someone to write up a piece explaining how to do this. He turned to a contributing writer named Jerry Ogden, who proposed to use the Intel 8008 processor to build a digital “computer trainer” and publish the instructions.
Before Ogden could finish, though, another magazine, Radio Electronics, published a piece in its July 1974 edition which featured a design by Jonathan Titus for an electronic “Mark 8” which used the newer and more powerful Intel 8080 chip. That article listed the parts and instructions for building a “computer” that could be programmed to do different things.
So Salsberg, hoping to jump ahead of his competitors, now wanted a design for a better computer using the more powerful 8080 chip, but instead of just a list of parts, he wanted to be able to sell it, in kit form, to readers of Popular Electronics. He now turned to writer Ed Roberts, who had been working on a design for an electronic calculator, and asked him to produce instead a “programmable computer”. The result was the Altair 8800.
To our modern eyes, the Altair doesn't look like much—just a box with some blinking lights on the front. But it was a breakthrough at the time. The “killer app” for it was a game called “Kill the Bit”, in which the lights flashed in a random sequence and you had to guess which light would be next. If you paid extra for memory boards, you could run programs written in BASIC and do more things (if you had a tape recorder interface and a teletype), such as crude Hangman and Star Trek games. None of it was “Fortnight” level—it wasn't even “Asteroids” level. But it was the best computer that any home-builder could buy at the time.
The cover photo of the Altair was, by the way, a fake. When Roberts finished the original prototype in October 1974 and shipped it to the magazine, the railroad shipping company workers were on strike, the prototype never arrived, and Salsberg was facing a deadline for his cover photo without any prop to shoot. So he simply pieced together an empty box with some blinking LEDs, placed an “Altair 8800” label on it, and photographed that.
But by featuring the Altair on its cover, Popular Electronics was able to talk Intel into allowing them to buy “cosmetically-imperfect” 8080 chips for just $75 each instead of the normal $300, which now allowed Salsberg to sell Altair kits for less than $400. Virtually every founding father of the home computer industry, from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, had an Altair in their garage. The simple little blinking box became the progenitor of the entire home computer industry. Ed Roberts formed his own company (Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) to make and sell Altair 8800s.
Today, the American Computer and Robotics Museum displays an original Altair 880 that was built and signed by Ed Roberts, as well as an original issue of the January 1975 Popular Electronics, with the Altair on the front cover, that is signed by Roberts, Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)