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Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer

You might think that Apple, Commodore or perhaps Radio Shack made the first personal computer, but you’d be wrong.

The Altair was featured on the cover and there was a companion article (written by Ed Roberts, owner of MITS) titled “Project Breakthrough! For your money you got the case, power supply, motherboard, CPU board, front panel with switches and LEDs, 256 bytes of RAM and assembly instructions. This BASIC was implemented on the Harvard PDP-10 mainframes by Bill and others (using an emulator they also had to write since they didn’t have an actual Altair to use), with Paul Allen flying to Albuquerque New Mexico in the summer to demonstrate it to Ed Roberts.

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