Video: The History of the Altair 8800, the World’s First Personal Computer

Just before the first personal computer, the Altair 8800, was released in 1975, inventor H. Edward Roberts, who died this week, predicted that his New Mexico calculator company would sell 800 of the machines in the first year. During the first month, they recieved 250 orders a day. And while it could compute (it was a computer after all), it didn’t really do anything else. It had no monitor, no keyboard, no printer jacks. (Keep that in mind the next time you hear some tech blog complaining that the newest tablet is missing 3G or USB.)

But that didn’t stop the fervor over the hot gadget of 1975. The Homebrew Computer Club was formed that year in celebration of – and in an attempt to suss out how to hack – the Altair, and a small army of Silicon Valley geeks began their campaign into a future of billion-dollar companies. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were early members of the Club, and Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to travel to New Mexico and develop the Altair’s first operating system, Microsoft Basic, with Paul Allen. That OS would morph into the computer empire that would begin to fulfill the Altair’s promise – putting PCs in every home.

Roberts sold his company in the late 1970s, and agreed to stay out of computers for five years. Moving to Georgia to become a physician, he never returned to Silicon Valley. Though the relationship between Gates and Roberts soured since their days working together, the Microsoft founder came to Roberts’ death bed last week, just before the 68-year-old died from pneumonia, to pay homage to the man responsible partly responsible for the machine you are reading this on.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak visit the Homebrew Computer Club in “Pirates of Silicon Valley”

Watch part 1 of the history of the Altair 8800 above and part 2 here, from Robert X. Cringely’s The Triumph of the Nerds