MITS Advert - May 1977
From Byte - The Small Systems Journal
/ability - It Comes Naturally With The Altair 8800b
This is an advert for the later-model Intel 8080-based Altair 8800b, showing several system boards rising out of its chassis.
Released in June 1976, it's an update to the original 8800 which had launched about seventeen months before in January 1975.
The improved model came with a faster Intel 8080A processor, additional switches on the front and 18-slot motherboard.
It was also significantly cheaper than the original machine, costing less than $400 (about £2,880 in 2026 money) when it launched in June 1976.
As such, it is widely recognised as "the computer that ignited the home microcomputer revolution"[1].
The original Altair 8800 was the machine that Bill Gates and Paul Allen had written their first BASIC for, after they'd speculatively asked MITS if the company needed one.
They actually wrote it - in less than a month - on a DEC PDP-10, the forerunner of the more-famous PDP-11 upon which much of the development work for Unix was done.
Following its success (it worked) they went on to found the company "Micro-Soft".
The rest, as they say, is history[2].
Meanwhile, MITS' founder - Ed Roberts - was getting bored with running the company and so ended up selling it to its own disk drive supplier, Pertec, in a deal which completed in May of 1977.
Pertec would end up moving sales away from the hobbyists and home users towards a more business focus, and was itself sold to Triumph-Adler in the late summer of 1979.
Date created: 01 July 2012
Last updated: 28 February 2026
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