Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems
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Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) was an Albuquerque, New Mexico company founded in 1968 by Forrest Mims and Ed Roberts. Initially MITS designed instrumentation and telemetry systems for the model rocket hobbyist market. The electronics packages were sold as kits to be built by the hobbyist. This led to other kits. There were audio generators, amplifiers, power supplies, radio controls for RC vehicles, and electronic hobbyist test instruments. The calculator kits became popular when information about the 816 Calculator kit was published in Popular Electronics in 1971.
The calculator kits remained popular among hobbyists until 1972 when Texas Instruments began to dominate the low cost calculator market. MITS is best known for creating the Altair 8800, and is commonly credited for starting the home computer industry.
[edit] Altair
In the early 1970s, MITS was close to going bankrupt, due to disappointing calculator sales. MITS developed the Altair 8800, one of the first hobbyist microcomputer kits in 1973 and 1974 using the Intel 8080 microprocessor. The Altair 8800 was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. For a time, MITS employed Bill Gates and Paul Allen as its software division, writing a BASIC interpreter, a Fortran compiler, a Disk Operating System, MITS-DOS, and other software for the Altair 8800 and its siblings before they left and founded Microsoft as an independent company in 1975, and then moved it to Washington State.
Shortly after the release of the Altair 8800 Ed Roberts contracted other electronics kit manufacturers to assist MITS meet the demands of new orders. Some of these companies such as IMSAI began to release similar compatible products. Roberts began to help new computer stores start up to sell the Altair products. They quickly began to sell other companies products as well. Roberts demanded that the newly founded computer stores only sell the Altair 8800 and not any competing products, alienating many of the store owners. This, as well as quality problems, prompted Roberts to sell the company for $6.5m USD to Pertec Computer in May 1977—one of the first casualties in the industry it spawned.
When MITS was overwhelmed by orders for the Altair 8800 after the cover story in Popular Electronics it had to move into new larger facilities. The success of the new products lead to investment into the development of many new kits and the company began to sell assembled printed circuit boards and assembled and tested computers. Memory boards for the Altair line included 1K, 4K, 16K, 32K, and 64K memory boards. The first were dynamic memory boards and most of the products became static memory boards. The Altair memory bus, standardized as the S-100 bus, was not designed for the kinds of noise future boards would introduce into the bus so there were noise suppression cards. Many early users wanted a terminal for the computers and the Compter was introduced. It was a small terminal using a Rockwell display which could display 40 characters of 80 stored characters in a line. It was quickly replaced by other terminals made by other manufactures when a serial interface card became available. A parallel interface card allowed printers and punch card systems.
Other Altair cards included analog to digital converter cards, music synthesizer cards, S-100 bus analyzer cards, relay input and output cards, and powerline serial communication cards. 8 bit, 16 bit, and 32 bit Analog to digital converter cards. These lead to the Altair being used in bowling pin setting machines, automated fluid testing in laboratories, tracking solar panel controllers, and many hobbiest began to automate their homes. Special Altair systems were made for PBX controllers for a large US phone system. Software was developed to write music in up to 16 voices, one voice per music card. The music synthesizer cards and the relay output cards were used to control Christmas trees, playing Christmas music while controlling lights on the tree, mapped by direct memory access, to coincide with the music.
The introduction of a floppy disk drive controller board and 8 inch Pertec floppy disks rapidly accelerated the interest in the systems. The 8 inch drive was replaced with the 6 inch drive when it became available. MITS became one of Pertec's largest customers.
One engineer, Steve Polini, designed an entire new product line around the Motorola 6800 CPU. Another engineer, Tom Durston, designed a high speed I/O controller. This controller used the Signetics 8X3000 bit slice CPU. It allowed the largest and fastest disk drives and tape drives to be used on the Altair computers. MITS made arrangements to sell the Pertec disk drives and tape drives on turn key business systems. The systems used MITS DOS and business software from Peachtree Software. Glenn Wolf started a new MITS division to repair MITS products. Within that division, Robert Lopez started the free customer service phone support service. Phone support provided insight to track Altair systems' spread around the globe.
After the sale of MITS to Pertec, Microsoft and Ed Roberts moved across Albuquerque. Roberts went on to become a physician, and is in practice in the state of Georgia. Dr. Eddie Curry, MITS VP, went on to start Lifeboat Associates. Glenn Wolf and Steve Polini moved to Australia. Pertec hired an entire management team from a Texas Instruments plant in Lubbock Texas. The new team focused on pushing manufacturing harder than on fixing quality problems. Microsoft filed suit against Pertec for the rights to the software packages. For a brief while all the software shipped was copyrighted by both Microsoft and Pertec. Microsoft won the law suit.
The new manufacturing line had a few serious problems. A used wave soldering machine had many problems which resulted in cold solder problems on circuit boards. An IC insertion machine bent pins under the chips where it was hard to see them by visual inspection. Mass production produced mass quality problems. There was a run of defective memory boards. Years later it was realized that the dynamic memory chips used on the boards suffered from Alpha particle discharge. The source of the Alpha particles was the plastic molding used to package the parts. The quality problems were overwhelming Pertec's Customer Service centers. In the fall of 1980 Pertec Computer Corporation closed down all manufacturing of the Altair products in Albuquerque.
