Popular Electronics

In January 1972, Popular Electronics merged with another Ziff-Davis magazine, Electronics World. The change in editorial staff upset many of their authors, and they started writing for a competing magazine, Radio-Electronics. In 1972 and 1973, some of the best construction projects appeared in Radio-Electronics. Art Salsberg became editor in 1974 with goal of reclaiming the lead in projects. He was impressed with Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter (Radio Electronics, September 1973) article and wanted computer projects for Popular Electronics. Don Lancaster did an ASCII keyboard for Popular Electronics in April 1974. They were evaluating a computer trainer project by Jerry Ogdin when the Mark-8 8008 based computer by Jonathan Titus appeared on the July 1974 cover of Radio-Electronics. The computer trainer was put on hold and the editors looked for a real computer system. (Popular Electronics gave Jerry Ogdin a column, Computer Bits, starting in June 1975.) One of the editors, Les Solomon, knew MITS was working on an Intel 8080 based computer project and thought Roberts could provide the project for the always popular January issue. The TV Typewriter and the Mark-8 computer projects were just a detailed set of plans and a set of bare printed circuit boards. The hobbyist faced the daunting task of acquiring all of the integrated circuits and other components. The editors of Popular Electronics wanted a complete kit in a professional looking enclosure. The typical MITS product had a generic name like "Model 1600 Digital Voltmeter". David Bunnell, Mits VP and future publisher of PC Magazine, PC World and Macworld, suggested Roberts call the new machine "Little Brother." Roberts thought better of this idea and considered calling it the PE-8. As a last resort, Roberts left the naming of the computer to the editors of Popular Electronics. At the first World Altair Computer Convention organized by Bunnell in March 1976, editor Les Solomon told the audience that the name was inspired by his 12-year-old daughter, Lauren. "She said why don't you call it Altair - that's where the Enterprise is going tonight." The Star Trek episode is probably Amok Time, as this is the only one from The Original Series which takes the Enterprise crew to Altair (Six). A more probable version is Les Solomon thought PE-8 sounded rather dull, so Les, Alexander Burawa (associate editor), and John McVeigh (technical editor) decided that: "It's a stellar event, so let's name it after a star." McVeigh suggested "Altair", the twelfth brightest star in the sky. Ed Roberts and Bill Yates finished the first prototype in October 1974 and shipped it to Popular Electronics in New York via the Railway Express Agency. However, it never arrived due to a strike by the shipping company. The first example of this groundbreaking machine is thus lost to history. Solomon already had a number of pictures of the machine and the article authored by Roberts but ghost written by Bunnell was based on them. Roberts got to work on building a replacement. The computer on the magazine cover is an empty box with just switches and LEDs on the front panel. The finished Altair computer had a completely different circuit board layout than the prototype shown in the magazine. The January 1975 issues appeared on newsstands a week before Christmas of 1974 and the kit was officially (if not yet practically) available for sale.

MITS Altair 8800

The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975, based on the Intel 8080 CPU and sold as a mail-order kit through advertisements in Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist magazines. The designers intended to sell only a few hundred to hobbyists, and were surprised when they sold thousands in the first month. Today the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that led to the personal computer revolution of the next few years: The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.

Plans to Programs

The head of the Physics Department eventually did give in to Aiken's request for space, but Aiken had to build the machine first.

Aiken took his first design to the Monroe Calculating Machine Co., which turned him down, but told him to try IBM's president Thomas J. Watson. He agreed to build Aiken's dream machine for the then outrageous cost of $200,000.

Since IBM funded and build the computer, it wound up consisting of the same mechanical parts the company used to construct its accounting machines, rather than electronics. The first electronic computer, ENIAC, would be built a few years later at the University of Pennsylvania soon after Aiken's machine in 1946.

Construction of the computer started in 1937 and continued through the end of 1943. Robert V. D. Campbell, MA '48, supervised the final assembly of the machine in an IBM plant in Endicott, N.Y.

The finished product stood 8 feet high, 51 feet long, and 2 feet wide. Although the machine might not have been the first electromechanical computer to be built, many computer pioneers believed that it sparked the computer age. The computer weighed five tons and consisted of about 760,000 parts, including 2,200 counter wheels, 3,300 relay components, and 530 miles of wire.

To work the machine, a person had to write a program converting problems into a code that could be read by the computer. That code was then converted into a series of holes punched into a paper roll of tape, each representing a single instruction. After being inserted into a tape reader, a series of feelers would find the holes, closing a relay switch every time one was found. Those relay switches routed information to other parts of the machine where numbers were stored in registers.

Counters, mechanical tables, and sensing circuits performed their calculations based on the numbers stored in those registers and the end results were printed by a set of automated typewriters.

Frequently-used sets of instructions could be stored for use in future problems, saving the time it would take to reprogram them. Grace Hopper, who worked for Aiken and who later invented the programming language COBOL, pioneered those routines. Programmers now call them library functions. She also claimed that she found the first computer "bug" - a moth crushed on a relay switch.

Howard Aiken: Makin' a Computer Wonder

Gazette Staff

The desire for answers to the questions raised by his doctoral thesis in physics led Howard Aiken to the conclusion that he would have to build a calculating machine unlike anything ever seen before at Harvard -- a computer.

Aiken needed numbers for his theory of space-charge conduction in vacuum tubes, but the problems were beyond the capability of desktop calculators of the day. Frustrated by his dilemma, in 1937 he wrote a proposal for a giant calculating machine, one that could represent negative and positive numbers, do standard arithmetic, and carry out more than one operation in a sequence.

"The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself," he wrote, although he would later joke that the computer was "only a lazy man's idea."

A year earlier, in 1936, Aiken had proposed his idea to the Physics Department, which did not see the same need for a computing machine and was reluctant to give up space for one in its building. He was told by the chairman, Frederick Saunders, that a lab technician, Carmelo Lanza, had told him about a similar contraption already stored up in the Science Center attic.

Intrigued, Aiken had Lanza lead him to the machine, which turned out to be a set of brass wheels from English mathematician and philosopher Charles Babbage's unfinished "analytical engine" from nearly 100 years earlier.

Aiken immediately recognized that he and Babbage had the same mechanism in mind. Fortunately for Aiken, where lack of money and poor materials had left Babbage's dream incomplete, he would have much more success.

Later, those brass wheels, along with a set of books that had been given to him by the grandson of Babbage, would occupy a prominent spot in Aiken's office. In an interview with I. Bernard Cohen '37, PhD '47, Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Science Emeritus, Aiken pointed to Babbage's books and said, "There's my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book."

Next fall Cohen has two books on Aiken due to debut from the M.I.T. Press: A Portrait of Howard Aiken, Computing Pioneer and Makin' Numbers: Howard Aiken and the Computer, a collection of essays edited by Cohen and Gregory M. Welch '85.