ColdFusion - The PC that started Microsoft & Apple! (Altair 8800)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You are watching Cold Fusion TV. Welcome to another Cold Fusion video. It goes without saying that the personal computer revolutionized businesses and homes around the globe, but what was the very first one? Where did it come from? And what's the story behind it? Interestingly enough, as you'll find out in this video, the PC was the impetus for both Microsoft and Apple. Let's begin. We have to travel back in time here to where this story has its prelude. The mid-20th century.

Starting point is 00:00:41 At this time, the computer was a big deal. You usually needed clearance to see one, let alone use one. This made it almost impossible for any inquisitive minds to use one without time sharing. At this time, in film and television, computers were seen as large, all-knowing devices, often referred to as the mechanical brain. Try and replace this all with a mechanical brain. He's under special assignment to a zai to see if Emirac can be adapted to this department to this department. That means the end of us all. Peg, peg, calm down.

Starting point is 00:01:12 No machine can do our job. That's what they said in payroll. Think about it from a person of the 1950s and 60s point of view. All your life, you'd been using manual tools such as slide rules or charts to do calculations. And then came an automatic computer which could magically do the maths for you. But then after this, something amazing happened. Computer technology began to evolve in capabilities, and it started doing logic, and was programmed to even play chess, things that traditionally required intelligence.

Starting point is 00:01:42 In 1952, a computer called Univac predicted the outcome of the U.S. presidential election by using some clever code and inputs on the results of previous races. Univac is going to try to predict the winner for us just as early as we can possibly get the returns in. This is not a joke or a trick. It's an experiment. We think it's going to work. We don't know. We hope it'll work.

Starting point is 00:02:06 The machine turned out this answer. that they didn't believe. The polls were telling them that was going to be about a 50-50 election and we were telling them it's a landslide with only 5% of the vote and they couldn't believe that you could predict the thing as accurate as we did which was in a few percent with only 5% of the vote so everybody was thrown into total confusion. The republic, excuse me. People were shocked and symbolically from that moment the computer had truly arrived. In the minds of the people it could do anything. Here's a 1960s East German film depicting a future computer of 1987. Films such as this

Starting point is 00:02:44 captured the imagination of anyone watching in the day. Globally, young tech minds would have been entranced by the concept of a computer growing up. One of those young minds was Bill Gates, and in January of 1975, he saw a magazine cover that would change his life and the course of history. That magazine was Popular Electronics, and on the cover of that magazine was a public personal computer. In an instant, all the possibilities were now within reach. There'll be more on Bill Gates later, but first, where did this computer come from? Well, one year earlier in 1974, Ed Roberts, an engineer, was trying to prevent his calculator business from going under. At a meeting with his bank lenders, in a last ditch attempt to save the company, he said that he could do something

Starting point is 00:03:32 that hadn't been done before. Create a personal computer kit for hobbyists. A task thought to be impossible at the time and only made possible by the microprocessor invented by Intel just three years earlier in 1971. For a bit of context, the microprocessor for the first time allowed an entire computer to be put onto one chip, a truly huge feat. Roberts named the microprocessor-driven computer, the Altair 8800 and sold it in the pages of the popular electronics magazine for $400 in January of 1970. Ed Roberts told the bank that they expected a few hundred orders at the most, but ended up being swamped with a couple of thousand orders within the first few months. At that time, all the computers in the world tended to be in big centers and you had to get permission to get close to them and it was, you know, you just, nobody could, nobody

Starting point is 00:04:25 had access to computers in. And the idea that you could have your own computer and do whatever you wanted to with it, whenever you wanted to, it was fantastic. The demand for the computer was so high that enthusiastic hobbyers. parked outside of the front of his warehouse to get their hands on the computers. The enthusiasm was driven by the fact that now everything that these guys had dreamed of and seen in movies was now within reach of everyone and moreover it could fit on your desk. Well, almost.

Starting point is 00:04:53 You see, the Altair 8800 was very primitive. There was no place to connect to keyboard or monitor. It was just a bunch of switches and lights. Although very simple, the Altair 8800 started a revolution. revolution. In mid-1975, a club was started in California in which enthusiasts gathered to discuss everything about the Altair 8800. The club's name was the Homebrew Computer Club, and one of the enthusiasts was a guy named Steve Wozniak. Wosniak later stated that it would be the very first meeting at the Homebrew Computer Club that inspired him to build his own computer,

Starting point is 00:05:28 which he would bring to each weekly meeting. This computer eventually became the Apple One, the computer that started Apple. In addition to being primitive, the Altair 8800 was very difficult to use. To load an instruction, you had to flip switches. For example, let's look at how you'd load 2 plus 2. Each two took eight different switches and a 9th switch to load them all. The plus instruction took 8 more switches, and you would know that the answer was 4 when the third light from the left turned on.

Starting point is 00:06:01 A 100 byte program would take 100 switches. It kind of makes me thankful for the ease of use of computers today. Despite the hurdles, though, the guys at the computer club were smart enough to come up with uses for it. Steve Dompier set up an altar, laboriously keyed a program into it. Somebody knocked the plug out of the wall, and he had to do that all over again. But nobody knew what this was about. After all, was it just going to sit and flash its lights? No.

Starting point is 00:06:32 You put a little transistor radio now. to the Altair and he would by manipulating the length of loops in the software could play tunes. The radio began playing The Fool on the Hill. And the tinny little tunes that you could tell were coming from the noise that the computer was generated, being picked up by the radio. Everybody rose and applauded. It was a very exciting thing. It was probably the first thing the Altair actually did. Although this demonstration blew minds at the time, in order to be a useful tool, the machine needed a programming language. As it turns out, Paul Allen, a high school friend of Bill

Starting point is 00:07:11 Gates, saw the magazine cover with the 8800 proudly sitting on it. He snatched it off the shelf and ran into Bill's college dorm room. When Bill saw it, he knew that this was it. The personal computer had arrived, but instead of getting excited, Bill saw a business opportunity and called up Ed Roberts's company Mitz and told them that he'd written some software for the 8800 and it was almost completed. The thing was they hadn't even started writing it yet. And saw this popular electronics magazine. And it was kind of in a way, you know, good news, bad news.

Starting point is 00:07:46 Here was someone making a computer around this chip in exactly the way that Paul had talked to me and we thought about what kind of software could be done for it. And it was happening without us. And for all we knew, maybe they had some software people. They were just going to go charge off and do this. thing. Because we'd never had the chip, just the book from Intel, if we'd made any mistake in terms of how the instructions worked, it never, nothing never would have run. And so Paul was

Starting point is 00:08:17 scheduled to fly out to Albuquerque. He decided to go get some sleep. I stayed up all night reading the book to see if we miscoded some of the instructions and finally decided it was all okay. Punch out the paper tape and made sure Paul got that before he went off on his plane. He wrote the bootstrap loader, that is the thing you have to key in to make this computer smart enough to know to go get data off the teletype to read it into memory. He wrote that on the plane on the way out, loaded it up in the paper tape. The first time, for some reason, it didn't work. The second time they loaded in and it worked. So it came up, said ready, and he typed in a program.

Starting point is 00:08:55 You know, print 2 plus 2. It worked. He had to print out squares and sums and things like that. and he and Roberts, the head of this company sat there and they were amazed by, you know, that this thing worked. I mean, Paul was amazed that our part had worked and Ed was amazed that his hardware worked. And this was the first piece of Microsoft software. After this moment, the 19-year-old Bill Gates saw that he could get an early foothold on the new PC industry and immediately quit university and went to live in New Mexico out of a hotel directly across the road from the Mitz factory,

Starting point is 00:09:28 the company that made the Altair Machine. From this hotel, Bill and Paul got to work writing more software for the 8800. Their software allowed the 8800 to now do much more. By the end of the year, people had attached terminals to the out-air and wrote games, accounting software and word processors on top of Bill and Allen's software code now called Microsoft. A true revolution had begun. The simple computer with switches and lights had now become a functioning machine closer to what we call a PC today just in the span of one year and this was all thanks to the software

Starting point is 00:10:05 that these two kids wrote. And as we know, the rest went pretty well for Microsoft. So there you have it. The Altair 8800, the little known first personal computer. If it didn't exist, there would be no Microsoft or Apple, as we know them today, or perhaps even at all. And as a side point, I think it's really cool that we can now just click a mouse and tap on a screen to load some software instead of flipping hundreds of switches. We should be grateful for that. Anyway, thanks for watching. If you think more people should learn about this golden piece of history,

Starting point is 00:10:38 feel free to share this video. Also, give it a thumbs up if you liked it, or thumbs down if you didn't. If you want to see some more cool stuff from this channel, hang around for the next 10 seconds and follow the prompts on your screen. This has been to Gogo. You've been watching Cold Fusion. Cheers, guys, and I'll catch you again soon for the next video. Have a good one. Cold Fusion. It's new thinking.

ColdFusion - The PC that started Microsoft & Apple! (Altair 8800)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.