Today in 1974, the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics arrived at the newsstands. Its cover featured the Altair 8800, the “World's First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models." In fact, it was the first commercially successful kit for microcomputers, later called “personal computers,” and the start of the “personal computing revolution.”
Les Solomon, a Popular Electronics editor, agreed to feature the kit on the cover of the always-popular January issue when Ed Roberts, co-founder of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), suggested to him he would build a professional-looking, complete kit, based on Intel’s 8080 chip. Stan Veit: “Roberts was gambling that with the computer on the cover of Popular Electronics, enough of the 450,000 readers would pay $397 to build a computer, even if they didn’t have the slightest idea of how to use it.”
MITS needed to sell 200 kits to breakeven but within a few months it sold about 2,000 just through Popular Electronics. Veit: “That is more computers of one type than had ever been sold before in the history of the industry.”
Visiting his high-school friend Bill Gates, then a student at Harvard University, Paul Allen, then a programmer with Honeywell, saw the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics at the Out of Town News newsstand at Harvard Square. Grasping the opportunity opened up by personal computers, and eager not to let others get to it first, the two developed a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair in just a few weeks. In April 1975, they moved to MITS’ headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, signing their contract with MITS "Paul Allen and Bill Gates doing business as Micro-Soft.''