Virtual Altair Museum Introduction

Altairs were originally "Hobbyist" computers and have their roots in kits. Altair construction manuals have step-by-step instructions like radio kits of the era. Prior to Altairs, electronic hobbyists built short wave radio kits sold by vendors such as Heathkit. The kits used transistors and even vacum tubes. Integrated circuits were new to the consumer market.

Altairs helped define the "personal" in Personal Computers. These machines where part of an open architecture concept that later made the PC successful. The S-100 bus allowed Altairs to be expanded and created opportunities for other companies to form.

You can still take your 8800 mainframe and build your dream system. Many Altair owners today have incomplete systems and bid for parts on ebay. These followers of the PC pioneers will enjoy some of the same enjoyment of the 70's as they build their Personal Altair.

The Virtual Altair Museum is collecting information and components to help preserve Altair history. I hope others will enjoy by viewing and reading about Altair components as they build a Virtual Altair in their imagination.

You may see a reference to IMSAI, Icom, Vector Graphic, Tarbell, PMMI, or other products that are not Altair or MITS products, it is because the systems were often mixed. These companies and components are an integral part of the Altair story. Prior to the Altair, circuit boards from different manufacturers were not compatible.

The MITS Altair was the first commercially available personal micro-computer and helped start the Microcomputer Revolution. The Altair was developed in the mid-seventies and used the 8080 microprocessor developed by Intel. At that time personal computers were called " hobbyist", "small-business", or "micro" computers.

The "Altair bus" used a connector with 100 pins and became known as the S-100 bus as more manufacturers adopted it.The Altair was followed by S-100 machines like the IMSAI., SOL, Morrow, Godbout/Compupro, Dynabyte, Cromemco, and Vector Graphic. The market shifted from hobbyist to small business. Machines like the Apple, Sol, Osborne, Kaypro were smaller and had integrated keyboards and video were used in home, school, and business. Later the IBM PC and it's clones replaced these machines for business and personal use.

The MITS/Icom Attache was created to compete with the SOL and Apple but was not well known. The Attache had a built in keyboard and video board and a ten-slot S-100 bus.

MITS once had the ad on the Back cover of Byte magazine Byte lists the MITS Altair 8800 as one of the Top 20 Small Systems.

The Altair featured a BASIC written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. MITS was Microsoft's first customer. During 1975, 1976, and 1977 the history of MITS paralleled Microsoft.

New Mexico - Cradle of the Personal Computer 

MITS stands for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. MITS started the Micro-Computer Revolution in Albuquerque, New Mexico. MITS was founded by Ed Roberts. MITS first made radio control devices, then calculators and later the Altair 8800 and Altair 8800a. The machines were often sold as kits. They were not as pretty as the Altair 8800b and had a weaker power supply . The early mainframes had few peripherals or daughter boards. Early Altair users sometimes used an ASR33 Teletype for a terminal.

Companies like Icom Microperipherals, Tarbell, and Micropolis filled the peripheral void with diskette subsystems. MITS made a two-board controller set for DC powered, Pertec FD410 hard-sectored 8-inch diskette drives. Later MITS and Icom used Pertec FD510 and FD514 SSDD AC powered drives. These drives were 2/3 Height.

Pertec bought MITS and Icom Microperipherals and formed the Pertec Microsystems Division, where I once worked.

This division changed names and leaders more than once and eventually killed the Altair. Pertec moved away from the "Hobbyist Computer" image of the 8800a and put the 8800b in a desk with the 3202 diskette sub-system and made the MITS 300/25 Small Business System. By adding a Pertec DC-3000 14-inch hard disk they made the MITS 300/55 Small Business System.

MITS also made the Altair 680b with a Motorola 6800 CPU. The 680b did not sell well. It was too small to look real and the memory cost more than the computer. There was a version of Microsoft Disk Basic 3.? and a Cassette Interface was available.

The MITS Dynamic Memory cards were a failure and help start the companies decline. It is not clear to me that the 16K dynamic board ever worked, but my engineer friends claim to have fixed it. I'll stick with the 16-MCS  Static cards. I had much trouble trying to debug ASDC software when BASIC string space kept getting corrupted. In California Bob and Lori Harp started Vector Graphic to provide S-100 memory boards. Later the Z-80 turned out to be the fix for dynamic memory. The 8080 didn't have support the dynamic memory refresh.

The ASDC Peachtree software stabilized after ISAM was fixed, MITS improved PRING USING and finally got the bugs out of garbage collection. The rest of the world went to CP/M and PCC went to MTX, a Business Basic II clone.

At Pertec MSD we built a "better" P-100 bus and the PCC 2000 computer that not too many people wanted. There was still some demand for the 8800b and MITS 300 Systems, but the systems cost too much to manufacture.

The PCC 1000 was killed and never saw the market. PCC thought no one would want a single board Z-80 with built-in 5.25-inch drives and monitor plus a detached keyboard. Later, Osborne and Kaypro thought different.

Pertec also bought CMC to form the illusion of the 38th largest computer company. Pertec negotiated to to sell the company to Phillips and acquired North American Phillips. The Phillips people killed the old ASDC Peachtree software and and replaced it with the MTX operating system and an accounting product called MAGIC. MTX was a timesharing Business Basic II clone and Pertec went after the Business Basic distributors when MAI went to direct sales. Pertec was later sold to Triumph-Adler in Germany. At this point I went to Vector Graphic and lost track of Pertec/TA and the PCC 2000. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who knows what happened to Pertec after it was acquired by Triumph Adler.

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