11-10-2024 - On This Day in Insane History

On November 10, 1969, the Altair 8800 microcomputer was first conceptualized by Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims, albeit not yet built, which would ultimately spark the personal computer revolution. This moment, tucked away in a small electronics engineering office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, represented a pivotal whisper that would eventually roar into a technological tsunami.

Roberts and Mims, working for MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), were engineering a calculator but realized they could create something far more revolutionary: a personal computer affordable for hobbyists. Their initial design, sketched on engineering paper, would become the blueprint that inspired young tech enthusiasts like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who would later develop Microsoft after seeing the Altair in Popular Electronics magazine.

The machine, which initially sold for $439 in kit form, required hobbyists to solder their own components and had a mere 256 bytes of memory—a microscopic fraction compared to modern computers. Yet this modest contraption would become the progenitor of the personal computing era, transforming how humanity would interact with technology for generations to come.

When the first units shipped in 1975, few could have imagined that this rudimentary machine would be the ancestor of the smartphones, laptops, and sophisticated computing devices we now consider essential to daily life.