Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

https://www.goto10retro.com/p/altair-at-50-remembering-the-first

86•rbanffy•11h ago

Comments

berlinbrowndev•10h ago

Cool I always thought the first PCs were like the TRS or Commodore 64 computers.

rbanffy•9h ago

There is some controversy - you could actually use a TRS-80, an Apple II or a PET right after taking it out of the box.

I think that, if we define a personal computer as a machine that is designed for a single interactive user, the LGP-30 would be a good candidate. It was not, however, a home computer.

For me, a personal computer needs more than switches and LEDs as its UI. With a serial port, a terminal, and a monitor program in ROM, the Altair would qualify.

anthk•9h ago

TRS-80, AII and the PET came later. You were right on the peripherals. Instead of a serial port, I'd set a TV output with a keyboard as an input, and the Altair would get far more sales.

fortran77•9h ago

The people I know who put together Altairs in 1975 used ASR-33 teletypes as terminals to run BASIC.

TheOtherHobbes•8h ago

Teletype and all, the Altair looked and worked like an cut-down entry-level version of the minis that were popular in engineering and science.

Not as powerful as a PDP-8, but less than a tenth of the price.

It was the perfect aspirational project for the electronics hobbyist community of the time.

The fact that you could barely do anything with it wasn't the point. It was a real computer you could set up at home and use without time restrictions or hourly billing.

The S-100 bus market turned into a preview of the PC market. S-100 systems soon sprouted real terminals, floppy drives, and workable memory, and began to appear in the offices of accountants and other non-tech professionals.

The IBM PC probably wouldn't have happened without it. It normalised relatively affordable computing, and the idea of a third party market of expansion cards on a standard bus.

SoftTalker•8h ago

A TV output means you need to create (and have memory dedicated to) the video. A serial port is much simpler.

rbanffy•7h ago

A 16x64 character screen like the TRS-80 needed 1k of RAM. IIRC, the Altair didn’t have that much memory out of the box.

The video memory would either be in the computer or the terminal. At least if it were in the computer, you could use it for other stuff.

SoftTalker•8h ago

Did it not have a serial port? Would have assumed that connecting it to a terminal or teletype was the standard thing.

whartung•8h ago

My first computing experience was with an IMSAI 8080 that class assembled the year before.

It had a keyboard and video board, rather than a terminal. The monitor was open chassis to boot (ah the old days when we didn’t protect children from lethal electricity).

It had a ROM monitor and cassette tape. You had to type in (in hex) a short machine language program into the monitor to load BASIC from a cassette. We simply never turned it off.

I tried ti enter the bootstrap through the front panel once, but I made some mistake, and it didn’t work. It was an awful enough experience I never tried again.

jmount•6h ago

Ah man- the power supply in the IMSAI 8080 was scary enough, plus you had the monitor power supply open. Fun times- the "book" sequence on ours was "fat finger in the paper tape reading software, read the cassette IO software from paper tape, load BASIC from cassette, and good to go."

ebruchez•7h ago

One of the interesting aspects of the Altair was that it was based on a bus called the S-100 bus. You would have a CPU card and a memory card at least, but everything else was optional. The serial board was separate, and strictly not absolutely necessary to play with the computer, since you could enter simple programs directly from the front panel.

SoftTalker•5h ago

I remember S-100 from when I was a kid. Never was hands-on with that hardware but there were all kinds of ads for cards in Byte magazine and others. Seemed like you could get a card for almost anything in S-100 protocol.

ebruchez•1h ago

That's right. There are still S-100 enthusiasts who are maintaining and developing S-100 cards, see http://www.s100computers.com/ (does not seem to respond correctly to HTTPS right now).

maj0rhn•1h ago

We had an Altair at home, that my father assembled from a kit. That version did not have a serial port. It had only the switches on the front panel. I did succeed in inputting some programs and in having them run. But of course it was appallingly limited.

The serial port was its own separate board. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaYTd3dbXeM

There were two very clever I/O ideas that emerged for the Altair: (1) A radio on top of the housing would pick up a signal, allowing audio output! (2) A cassette tape recorder could be used as an external storage device, though I forget how it interfaced... the serial board, I think.

dowager_dan99•6h ago

keep the historical context in mind. There were people who wanted a computer at home and people who wanted to bring home the experience they got with access to powerful mainframe & minicomputers at work or school, so there was both a push to build your own computer and a desire to build IO devices like teletypes. The combo, all-in-one is the real revolution (IMO) that you got with the Apple II or the Sol. The TRS-80s and PETs feel a lot more like early commercialization in comparison. Woz was motivated by showing off what he could create, because that's how he communicated. It makes sense that a keyboard and TV - with graphics - shows off way better, same with being able to program in basic "... for $300 you can build a computer that's so good you can type programs on it and run them..."

Pet_Ant•4h ago

You might want to look at the Sol-20, Micral N, and Kenbak-1 as well. From 1971, the Kenbak was a _personal_ computer, but not a personal _micro_ computer.

The Wang 2200 looks most like we'd expect a personal computer to look like, but the price range was not home-friendly (~$50k today).

chasil•2h ago

The Intel line was fathered by the Datapoint 2200; they implemented the CPU in TTL logic boards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200

The 6502 line came out Motorola's failure to "indulge" their employees in a low-cost 6800, thus unintentionally fathering MOS Technologies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502

The 6502 was extremely inexpensive. The first implementation was the KIM-1, so this is the first on that side.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1

mixmastamyk•25m ago

Commodore had the PET in the late 70's, and the Vic-20 before the 64 in the early 80s.

Apple had the II in the late 70s, and before that was the Altair.

igtztorrero•9h ago

The Altair didn’t survive for very long, but essentially being responsible for the creation of Microsoft is a pretty Big Deal.

Bill Gates: "Popular Electronics" magazine cover of January 1975 change my life"

Paul Allen write the simulator on Harvard PDP-10, Bill Gates write main code of Basic, Monte Davidoff write Math package. They coded day and night during 2 months.

Micro-Soft was born.

JSR_FDED•8h ago

Similarly it inspired the start of Apple!

rbanffy•8h ago

Apple got a couple things right - the II had a keyboard, TV output with graphics, and plug-and-play slots (no fiddling with jumpers and dip switches like s-100 and PCs): each card had a well defined space for IO and ROM.

thesuitonym•7h ago

Note that the Apple I was a kit computer that didn't come with anything other than the board and the chips. Not even a case! It's not really like Jobs and Woz had the brilliant idea that nobody had thought of before to include the accessories, it's just that the prices had come down to the point where a person wouldn't balk at buying a preassembled computer with a keyboard, display and a couple of floppy drives.

rbanffy•6h ago

> It's not really like Jobs and Woz had the brilliant idea

They understood that, if the computer had a keyboard and a professional-looking case, a lot more people would buy one.

Someone•6h ago

Jobs certainly understood that, but Woz?

https://www.apple2history.org/history/ah04/:

”Jobs thought the cigar boxes that sat on the … desktops during Homebrew meetings were as elegant as fly traps. The angular, blue and black sheet-metal case that housed Processor Technology’s Sol struck him as clumsy and industrial … A plastic case was generally considered a needless expense compared to the cheaper and more pliable sheet metal. Hobbyists, so the arguments went, didn’t care as much for appearance as they did for substance. Jobs wanted to model the case for the Apple after those Hewlett-Packard used for its calculators. He admired their sleek, fresh lines, their hardy finish, and the way they looked at home on a table or desk.”

rbanffy•1h ago

> Jobs certainly understood that, but Woz?

This is why we need to surround ourselves with people we don't always agree with.

reaperducer•7h ago

Altair didn’t survive for very long,

The company sold itself to Pertec for what was a very good amount of money back then.

In HN terms, it was a successful unicorn bro exit.

dowager_dan99•6h ago

and if I remember it correctly Roberts used the money to buy a peanut farm? Is that equivalent to a tech bro buying the coast of California or an island?

bbarnett•5h ago

Did he use all the money, or some?

reaperducer•2h ago

The property records are probably online. Go nuts.

dowager_dan99•6h ago

and the fact that MITS couldn't keep up with demand gave birth (IMO) to the 3rd party (licensed and unofficial) peripherals ecosystem.

shakna•9h ago

I was completely distracted by the magazine cover. The calculator being advertised there, and the wording, caught my attention.

The magazine issued is available here [0].

Apparently, it really was wiring up an entire calculator.

> ... Start assembly by installing and soldering into place the fixed resistors. Then proceed to installing the three electrolytic capacitors, the diodes, and the transistors, taking care to observe proper polarity and basing. Mount the transistors close to the board’s surface...

[0] https://archive.org/details/197501PopularElectronics

hvs•9h ago

Until microcomputer boom of the 70's and 80's there was the calculator boom of the early 70's. The availability of the microprocessor made small calculators widely available for the first time and they were very popular among the type of people that probably would've read Hacker News had it existed.

Sharlin•5h ago

What caught my eye was the headline about CCDs as successors to video camera tubes. Charge-coupled devices being, of course, the sensor technology now used by essentially all of the billions of digital cameras on the planet.

MBCook•1h ago

Hasn’t basically everyone switch from CCD to CMOS sensors these days?

I don’t know the technical difference other than what each stands for.

danbruc•9h ago

Cost the equivalent of $2359 back then, right now you can get a few on eBay for around $5000. Or you can get a mini replica kit for $150. [1]

[1] https://altairmini.com/en/home

twoodfin•2m ago

Lest you worry you (or your parents) should have stashed away a few Altairs, that $397 in a tax-advantaged retirement account investing in the S&P 500 would be worth more than $70k today.

NoSalt•7h ago

Wow ... the man who invented it, Ed Roberts, had quite the life:

  • Air Force enlisted

  • Air Force comissioned

  • Electrical Engineer

  • Computer inventor

  • "Gentleman" farmer

  • Medical doctor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computer_engineer)

pipes•3h ago

Bill Gates goes into this in his autobiography, source code. Paints a very positive picture of him.

embedded_hiker•5h ago

My school library ( 6th - 8th grades ) had this magazine, and they had a 9-week class on programming in BASIC using a 110 bps teletype connected to an HP2000C that was shared by several school districts. That was my start in all of this. I didn't get my own computer until the C64 price dropped to $200 in 1983.

CarVac•3h ago

My dad has an IMSAI 8080 which is a neat piece of hardware. It still works, though a few LEDs failed.

Unfortunately for him, in university one of his professors advised him not to go into computers for a career...

kabdib•1m ago

in 1977 or so my dad (a college professor) advised me not to go into computers

a couple of decades later (i hadn't listened, and had been working for high-tech Silly Valley for quite a while) he apologized :-)

jodydonetti•3h ago

Olivetti P101 (1965)

https://www.fondazioneadrianolivetti.it/en/p101-cecam/

pan69•20m ago

It's an interesting one. Some people call it a Personal Computer others call it a calculator. However you classify it, it was certainly a interesting and important stepping stone and it's a shame that a lot of European innovations are often forgotten or skimmed over:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_101

mrcwinn•2h ago

For those interested in Ed Roberts, refer to Robert Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds," in particular Volume 1.

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Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

Comments

Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry

Show HN: I built a synthesizer based on 3D physics

Derivation and Intuition behind Poisson distribution

Show HN: GPT-2 implemented using graphics shaders

Building Burstables: CPU slicing with cgroups

The History of Album Art

Normalizing Ratings

VR Design Unpacked: The secret to Beat Saber's fun

OneText (YC W23) Is Hiring a DevOps/DBA Lead Engineer

Show HN: Blast – Fast, multi-threaded serving engine for web browsing AI agents

Driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes

Strings Just Got Faster

Doom GPU Flame Graphs

Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

The Cannae Problem

A proof of concept tool to verify estimates

Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

Elm Test Distributions

A Common Lisp jq replacement

The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)

Suno v4.5

Relational Graph Transformers

Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits

The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain

When Americana doesn't mean American

How to live an intellectually rich life

Just redesigned my personal site with a TTY-style interface

Show HN: Kinematic Hand Skeleton Optimization in Jax

Show HN: Exhibit and Site on Mechanisms for Students

Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer