The
MITS Altair 8800 was a
microcomputer design from 1975 based on the
Intel 8080 CPU and sold by mail order through advertisements in
Popular Electronics,
Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist magazines. The designers hoped to sell a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were surprised when they sold thousands in the first month.
The Altair also appealed to individuals and businesses who just wanted a computer and purchased the assembled version.
Today the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that led to the
microcomputer revolution of the next few years: The
computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a
de facto standard in the form of the
S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was
Microsoft's founding product,
Altair BASIC.