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Total share: 30 years of personal computer market share figures


The Altair (1975-77)

Ed Roberts always dreamed of becoming a doctor, but instead he wound up starting his own private electronics company. Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) started out selling model rocket telemetry kits and subsequently recently branched out into selling pocket calculators. By 1973, the company had a couple of dozen employees, and was doing fairly well. Then electronics giants that manufactured their own CPUs and other chips, like Texas Instruments, began a calculator price war that nearly drove MITS into bankruptcy.

With his company over US$300,000 in debt, Roberts took a fateful trip to the bank, to discuss whether or not he would have to shut down the company. He told the bank manager about his plans to sell a kit computer to electronics hobbyists. The manager wanted to know how many Roberts expected to sell each month, and he guessed that they might sell as many as a hundred. This was enough to stave off the company's execution.

In the mean time, Les Solomon, the technical editor of Popular Electronics magazine, was looking for a cover story to compete with Radio Electronics' article on how to assemble a machine called the "Mark 8" from a collection of bare parts including an Intel 8008 CPU. The Mark 8 was merely a list of parts, but Solomon wanted a story about a fully-fledged personal computer that you could go out and buy, if not in fully assembled form, at least in an easy-to-build kit. He contacted Ed Roberts who told him about his plans, and a mockup of Robert's design made it on the cover of Popular Electronics' January 1975 issue.

The machine needed a name. Les Solomon asked his young daughter what the computer on Star Trek was called, and she replied "Computer." Telling her that was less than helpful, she retorted that they should call it the "Altair," as that was where the Enterprise was headed that week. The name stuck.

The Altair looked in some respects like a modern desktop computer (at least in the days when desktops actually sat on your desk). It was encased in a metal and plastic rectangular box that opened up to allow the user to connect add-on boards. However, there was no keyboard or display offered with the system initially. The machine was programmed by flicking a series of toggle switches on the front panel, and the results of the program could be viewed on a long string of LEDs. Roberts admitted that the design for the front panel was significantly inspired by the panel of Data General's popular Nova minicomputer.

The original Altair computer, with its top off

Ed Roberts had worked out a deal with Intel to purchase 8080 CPUs. Normally, these CPUs sold for US$300 in small quantities, but Roberts was able to purchase a batch with cosmetic defects for only US$75 each. This enabled him to set the price of the Altair kit at US$399. He calculated that he would need to sell 200 units over the product's lifetime to reach the break-even point. After a week of being available on the market, MITS had orders for over 2,000 machines.

Basically, the hobby electronics community went nuts. The pent-up demand for a personal computer was so great that MITS had far more orders than it could possibly ship. People were willing to wait for months for the company to work its way through the backlog, just so they could get a machine of their own. Some people even set up camp outside MITS headquarters.

The success of the new machine spawned a collection add-on hardware products and imitators. Other companies cloned the Altair's 100-pin 8-bit bus, and called it the "S-100" bus, infuriating Roberts. Boards that interfaced with teletypes and CRT terminals made the Altair resemble a modern computer. A young HP employee named Steve Wozniak saw the Altair at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting and decided that he could make something like it himself, which ended up becoming the Apple I. And an unknown college dropout named Bill Gates, together with his partner Paul Allen, wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair, forming a company called Micro-Soft in the process. He would later drop the hyphen and the capital S, and make billions of dollars.

MITS struggled to keep up with demand, not only for the Altair, but for the 4k memory cards that were required to run BASIC. Competition from other add-on companies and new computer companies hurt MITS, and Roberts eventually sold the company to the hard disk manufacturer Pertec in May 1977. Pertec management failed to move the company forward and it went bankrupt a few years later.

The Altair ultimately failed in the marketplace, but it sold thousands of units and jump-started the entire personal computer industry. The concept and form factor of desktop computers, with add-on boards that plugged into a standardized bus, the concept of third-party software, and the idea of retail computer dealers and dealer expositions were all pioneered by MITS. Ed Roberts took the millions from the sale of his company and reinvested them in himself. He completed his medical training and achieved his life-long dream of becoming a doctor. He still keeps an Altair in his office.

Ed Roberts, with his creation

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