s one day, very close to its release, Roberts was sitting around his house and his daughter, Lauren, was watching Star Trek. He ask her what the name of the computer on Star Trek was, but she replied that she thought it was just "computer." Next he asked her what she thought he should call his computer. Lauren replied very simply "Why dont you call it Altair? Thats where the Enterprise is going tonight." (Freiberger and Swaine 34) And the name stuck. When it was released Roberts computer was named the Altair 8800, the 8800 part of the name coming out of Intels 8080 processor.The Altair 8800 debuted on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine in January 1975. The picture on the cover was actually only a mock up, the first Altair was lost in the mail, so they had photograph an empty box (Triumph; Campbell-Kelley and Aspray 240; Freiberger and Swaine 34-35). The Altair was an instant success. As soon as the article debuted, orders started flooding in to MITS. As Les Solomon said "Two thousand people sent checks to an unknown company" (Freiberger and Swaine 37). The Altair shipped as a kit, you had to put it together yourself. Putting it together took considerable knowledge of electronics. It also had the annoying tendency to not work. Despite these facts, though, it continued to sell very well. Hobbyists were elated with the fact that they could own their own personal computer (Triumph; Freiberger and Swaine 38; Kidwell and Ceruzzi 94). The biggest turn-off of the Altair, though, was its sheer uselessness. All input was done through a series of switches on the front panel of the Altair, and all output was given in the form of flashing LEDs on the front panel just above the switches (Triumph). The kit shipped with the mainboard (the board that connected all the other parts), a processor card (a card that plugged into the mainboard which contained the processor), and 256 byte memory card (a byte is 8 bits, or binary digits. Therefore a byte...
