[1] Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims founded MITS in December 1969 to produce miniaturized telemetry modules for model rockets such as a roll rate sensor.

[6] He soon became an electronics instructor at the Cryptographic Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

[7] To augment his meager enlisted man's pay, Roberts worked on several off-duty projects and even set up a one-man company, Reliance Engineering.

The most notable job was to create the electronics that animated the Christmas characters in the window display of Joske's department store in San Antonio.

Roberts earned an Electrical Engineering degree from Oklahoma State University in 1968 and was assigned to the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

[9] Mims graduated from Texas A&M University in 1966 (major in government with minors in English and history) then became a commissioned officer in the U.S. Air Force.

Later, Roberts and Stan Cagle, a civilian worker who also went to Oklahoma State, started building a power supply they hoped to sell.

Roberts, Mims, Cagle and another Air Force officer from the Lab, Bob Zaller, decided they could design and sell electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists.

Reliance Engineering president Henry Roberts announced that "MITS is presently conducting an intensive research program involving high quality miniature telemetry systems."

With the hope of selling kits to the larger readership; Roberts and Mims designed a device that would transmit voice over a beam of light, the Opticom.

The payment for the articles was $400 but meeting Les Solomon, Popular Electronics technical editor, proved to be significant to both Mims and Roberts future success.

In August 1970, Les Solomon, his wife and daughter were on vacation in the southwest and arranged to visit Mims, Roberts and their families.

Meyer had built a million dollar a year business that sold kits of parts to build the project that he and Lancaster wrote about.

In July 1970, a semiconductor company, Electronic Arrays, announced a set of six LSI ICs that would make a four-function calculator.

To fund the new project, Roberts sold 15% of MITS to fellow Air Force officer, Lieutenant William Yates.

[24] The steady flow of calculator sales allowed MITS to run full page advertisements in Radio-Electronics, Popular Electronics and Scientific American.

In the June 1972 Radio-Electronics, MITS announced a 14 digit calculator (Model 1440) with memory and square root function for $199.95 kit and $249.95 assembled.

Dan Meyer, Don Lancaster, Forrest Mims, John Simonton and many other authors immediately started contributing to the competing Radio-Electronics magazine.

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.

The Teletype Model 33 ASR was a popular terminal because it provided printed output and data storage on punched paper tape.

The Altair 8800 kit came with a front panel, a CPU board with the Intel 8080 microprocessor, 256 bytes of RAM, a 4-slot backplane and an 8-amp power supply for $439.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote Altair BASIC with Monte Davidoff contributing the Floating-point arithmetic routines.

[48] The first full page advertisements for the Altair computer appeared in the February issues of Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics magazines.

Ed Roberts wrote a monthly "Letter from the President" column where he would answer customer questions and even review competing products.

The most notable seminar was at Rickey's Hyatt House in Palo Alto, California in early June 1975, where a member of the Homebrew Computer Club left with an unreleased copy of Altair BASIC.

[57] The technical manuals for the Altair 8800 provided electrical schematics of the 100 pin computer bus allowing others to design compatible boards.

Lee Felsenstein designed an Altair compatible video board that provided 16 lines of 64 upper and lower case characters on a black and white television.

[62] It corrected many shortcomings of the original Altair 8800 by providing a larger power supply, a 22 slot motherboard, and easier wiring of the front panel.

[69] While Allen modified their development software for the new 8080 microprocessor, Gates began writing 8080 assembly language by hand on yellow legal pads.

[74] Paul Allen left his job at Honeywell and became the Vice President and Director of Software at MITS with a salary of $30,000 per year.