The Altair was a bare-bones Intel 8080 box with switches and blinking lights — no keyboard, no monitor. Hobbyists ordered thousands of kits; Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote Altair BASICBeginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code — an early programming language designed for ease of learning. for it and founded MSMicrosoft — the software company behind Windows, Office, and many developer tools.. Every garage-startup PCPersonal computer — a computer designed for individual use, especially desktop or laptop machines. narrative starts here: cheap hardware + software you could sell.

The Altair proved a market existed for personal microcomputerA small computer built around a microprocessor — the category that became personal computers.s beyond mainframeA large, powerful computer for centralized organizational workloads — dominated enterprise computing before PCs.s and minis.

It launched the hobbyist-to-industry pipeline that produced Apple, MicrosoftThe software giant behind Windows, Office, Azure, and Xbox — founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen., and the IBMInternational Business Machines — a major computer and enterprise technology company since the early 20th century. PCPersonal computer — a computer designed for individual use, especially desktop or laptop machines. ecosystem.