IMSAI Advert - December 1976

IMSAI - an abbreviation of "Information Management Sciences Associates Incorporated" - was founded in San Leandro, California, in 1973 as a consulting firm providing mainframe services to government and business^[1].

The company's first micro - the IMSAI 8080 - was developed in the early summer of 1975 as essentially a clone of MITS' Altair 8800^[2], with the copying going right down to the expansion-card bus used.

In doing so it helped make the Altair Bus - which would later be renamed as Standard 100, or S-100 - the standard expansion architecture for many micros of the 1970s, and even a few into the mid 1980s.

The IMSAI 8080 is also the computer that famously appeared in the nerd-classic film 'WarGames'^[3], as used by Matthew Broderick's character David Lightman.

It was chosen because it was looked more like how people still expected computers to operate, despite having been released seven years before the film was made.

It definitely had tons of geek cred, what with its programme-by-switches and LEDs interface - a feature sometimes known as Blinkenlights.

This advert appeared in the December issue of Popular Electronics, along with its contemporaries the Altair 8800 and 680.

The fully-assembled price of $931 equates to nearly £7,870 in 2025 terms - the cost of a reasonable second-hand car.