Ask HN: What was the main reason people bought the Altair 8800?

4 points by zach417 8 years ago | 2 comments

How would you categorize the MITS Altair 8800 (and other very early microcomputer kits): education, entertainment, utility, or something else?

Put another way, if someone bought one, did they mainly do so because the prospect of putting it together and programming it seemed like fun, they were hoping to learn a lot about computers, they wanted to program it to do something so useful that it made up for the price, or something else?

They were obviously the cheapest computer you could buy at the time, but still, at around $2,500 (CPI inflation-adjusted), most people would have had to have a pretty good reason to buy it.

jpindar 8 years ago |

Back then it was fun to get any time on any computer, regardless of whether what you were doing was objectively interesting or not.

Your OWN computer? That you could keep using all night if you wanted to? Whoa....

DanBC 8 years ago |

A lot of it comes from radio ham enthusiasts. They had clubs and magazines set up to talk about hobbyist electronic tinkering for radio, and that expanded to include general electronics, and then computing.

Here's a 1973 example of a "tv typewriter": http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/RadioElectronics/TV_Typewriter....