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The remarkable feature of the Altair was not the metal case, or the rows of switches and lights on the front panel, or the enthusiasm of Popular Electronics, or that it came from Albuquerque. Rather, it was one electronic component that lay inside: a semiconductor chip mounted on a piece of inch-long black plastic and marked in tiny lettering INTEL 8080. The chip, which was no larger than the numbers 8080 as they appear on this page, contained the central processing unit of a computer and was the most notable example of what the semiconductor companies had taken to calling a microprocessor.

The conceptual framework for the microprocessor corresponded with the ideas that lay behind all digital electronic computers produced after World War II. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, IBM’s 1130, Varian’s 620i, Digital Equipment’s PDP-8 and Data General’s Nova all used the same principles as the Intel 8080. The only difference was size. The thirty-ton ENIAC with its eighteen thousand vacuum tubes was less powerful than the Intel 8080 which, with its five thousand transistors, could be swallowed. The central processing units of computers like the Data General Nova had been composed of dozens of chips, each of which was designed to perform a limited task. Chips like the 8080 approached the power of some of the early minicomputers but freed engineers from the tiresome task of ensuring solid connections along the hundreds of solder traces that ran between the chips.

The 8080 was the third microprocessor produced by Intel, a semiconductor company founded in Santa Clara in 1969, whose name was a contraction of Integrated Electronics. Intel’s first microprocessor, the 4004, was part of a set of chips designed to control a desk-top calculator. Though the company had advertised the 4004 as introducing “a new era of integrated electronics,” its portentous content had been difficult to appreciate. Under a microscope the patterns on the 4004 looked like a busy suburban road map. Yet the microprocessor, dozens of which were etched on a single wafer of silicon, were a more significant advance in the techniques of mass production than Henry Ford’s moving assembly line.

The infinite flexibility of the microprocessor, which could be programmed to perform any number of tasks, had been accompanied by similarly prodigious advances in another area of semiconductor technology—memory chips. Computer programs, composed of millions of 1s and 0s that had, until the late sixties, been stored in bulky core memories could now be stored on chips. This made it cheaper and easier to write programs. Microprocessors could be connected to two sorts of memory chip. They could read programs stored on chips called ROMs and they could read and change programs written on a more complicated chip called a RAM. Because the microprocessor could be programmed to perform dozens of tasks, it reduced the cost of anything that required mechanical parts while simultaneously increasing its value.

The Homebrew Club members were, understandably, more interested in the practical applications of microprocessors than in the history of mass production. Most of them knew about a small computer kit, the Mark 8, that had been built around Intel’s second microprocessor, the 8008. That microprocessor had prompted a Southern California schoolteacher to publish the “Micro-8 Newsletter” whose primary purpose was to keep hobbyists abreast of programs written for the 8008. But by the spring of 1975 the 8080 had become the center of interest. It was twenty times as powerful as the 4004 and could handle eight bits (rather than four bits) at a time. Unlike the 8008 which needed about twenty other chips to make it useful, the 8080 could manage with six peripheral chips. It could also be hooked to 65K bytes of memory compared to the 4K bytes of the 4004.

One of the Homebrew members revealed that he had driven all the way from California to New Mexico just to take delivery of his Altair. But the computer that was eyed with curiosity in French