Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, universally known as MITS, was a small electronics company in Albuquerque, New Mexico that became the birthplace of the personal-computer industry. Founded by Ed Roberts with partners, it began by making electronics for model rockets and then telemetry kits, and in the early 1970s shifted into the booming market for electronic calculator kits before a price collapse in calculators left the company in serious financial trouble.
To survive, Roberts gambled on a computer. Using the new Intel 8080 microprocessor, MITS designed the Altair 8800, a build-it-yourself computer, and arranged for it to appear as the cover story of the January 1975 Popular Electronics. MITS’s own materials from 1975, such as the Altair Computer Report preserved in the bitsavers collection on the Internet Archive, show how the company presented the machine, its expansion boards, and its growing product line to customers. In his Computer History Museum interview, Roberts recounted that the response overwhelmed the company: orders arrived by the thousand, and MITS had to hire extra staff just to answer the phones and process the flood of demand.
MITS’s significance goes well beyond selling a clever kit. Its open expansion bus, later standardized as the S-100 bus, created room for an entire third-party hardware industry. And MITS was the customer for the very first Microsoft product: when Bill Gates and Paul Allen offered a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, MITS licensed it as Altair BASIC and even employed Allen for a time, putting the young Microsoft on its feet. The Altair and its peripherals also became a fixture of early user groups like the Homebrew Computer Club.
The company’s later history was less triumphant. MITS could not keep pace with the demand it had created or with the competitors that its open architecture had invited, and disputes, including a famous one with Microsoft over the BASIC license, strained the business. In 1977 Roberts sold MITS to Pertec, and the Altair brand faded as newer machines from Apple, Commodore, and Tandy reshaped the market.
Even so, MITS holds a permanent place in computing history as the company that turned the microprocessor into a personal computer people could actually buy. Its brief, chaotic, formative run in the mid-1970s set the commercial and technical patterns that the personal-computer industry built on for the rest of the decade.