The writer and essayist Carlo Gubitosa, who has long dealt with digital issues also from a historical point of view, argues: “There could be a date for the birth of the personal computer. This date is January 1, 1975 when the issue of Popular Electronics magazine comes out, reaching half a million electronics enthusiasts. The Altair 8800 is presented on that issue, a machine that has by now become part of history, a computer that gathers around itself the second generation of hackers: the “hardware hackers”, who penetrate into the secrets of Altair to understand the functioning of each single circuit “.
In reality, that issue of Popular Electronics did not come out on January 1st, obviously and on the cover it only shows a generic “january”. Which is why we are talking about it today, January 5 (in 1975 it was a Sunday, not likely as an exit it must be said). Apart from this minimal inaccuracy, Gubitosa’s statement is pertinent: Popular Electronics, as the cover slogan stated, was the “best-selling electronics magazine in the world“: founded in 1954, until 1982, when it became Computer & Electronics , it was the bible of the information revolution; a cover story of his, it was said, was capable of creating new markets. This is what happened in January 1975. In fact, the computer we are talking about, the Altair 8800, was released on the market a couple of weeks earlier, on December 19, 1974 but it was that cover that launched it: produced by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems ( MITS), was very different from the personal computers we know, yet it was a formidable inspiration for more than a generation of “geeks”: it is said that the Altair 8800 – of which five thousand units were sold in the first eight months – was very popular at the Homebrew Computer Club where at the time there were the very young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who a year later would present the Apple I; while it is certain that Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen began writing software for Altair, Basic, the first product on which Microsoft would later be created.
But back to the Altair 8800 and the cover story. Gubitosa writes: “The photograph reproduced on”Popular ElectronicsIn fact, it is that of a device created ad hoc for the presentation of the product and absolutely not working. It is a long time before the thousands of pieces ordered are delivered, and some of the most persistent hackers, to get hold of their Altair, camp out in front of the headquarters of the Model Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS), the Altair manufacturing company headed by Edward Roberts. MITS is headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico (where the series is also set Breaking Bad). The computer is sold as an assembly kit, the final result of which is a metal box with a front panel consisting of a row of switches that constitute the only input device, and two rows of small red lights as an output device. It is based on the Intel 8080 processor, costs $ 397 and has 256 bytes of memory. Instructions cannot be stored inside the computer, but must be entered by hand through the front panel switches each time the computer is turned on. Hence the typical sores and blisters on the fingers that characterized the computer enthusiasts of the time “.
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