-- It was not Bill Gates, Yates designed hardware at MITS, Gates was the software guy from Harvard --> finished the first prototype in October 1974 and shipped it to Popular Electronics in New York via the Railway Express Agency.
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In 1969, Roberts and Mims, along with Stan Cagle and Robert Zaller, founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in Roberts' garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and started selling radio transmitters and instruments for model rockets.
The first commercial PC, the Altair 8800 (by MITS), used an Intel 8080 CPU with a clock rate of 2 MHz (2 million cycles/second).
The effort was inspired by the history of the Altair 8800, one of the first DIY home computer kits released in 1975.
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The Altair 8800 is largely credited with triggering the home computing revolution and the transition from the industrial mainframe to the consumer desktop, by making a low-cost, open and “hackable” computer accessible to home enthusiasts for the first time.
He did some initial work with video and sound reproducing with an Altair 8800 computer.
Altair | Altair 8800 | Kai Altair |
Radio News became Popular Electronics and the January 1975 issue featured the Altair 8800 computer on the cover; this launched the personal computer revolution.
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) produced the Altair 8800 in 1975, which is widely regarded as starting the microcomputer revolution.
Bunnell was in Triumph of the Nerds, a 1996 documentary, commenting Paul Allen demonstrating their BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 and how it was significant.