- A certain pattern of technological development recurred many times in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century: a scattered hobby community, tinkering with a new idea, develops it to the point where those hobbyists can sell it as a product. This sets off a frenzy of small entrepreneurial firms, competing to sell to other hobbyists and early adopters. Finally, a handful of firms grow to the point where they can drive down costs through economies of scale and put their smaller competitors out of business. Bicycles, automobiles, airplanes, and radio broadcasting all developed more or less in this way.
- [Ed Roberts] pitched Solomon [Les Solomon, editor at Popular Electronics] a promise that he could build a computer around the new, more powerful Intel 8080 processor. This pitch became Altair—named, according to legend, by Solomon’s daughter, after the destination of the Enterprise in the Star Trek episode “Amok Time”—and it set the hobby electronics world on fire when it appeared as the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover story.
- This was the SCELBI 8-H, the first computer kit based around a microprocessor, in this case the Intel 8008.
- The first electronic hobbyist to take an interest in building computers, whom we know of, was Stephen Gray. In 1966, he founded the Amateur Computer Society (ACS), an organization that existed mainly to produce a series of quarterly newsletters typed and mimeographed by Gray himself.
- He [Stephen Gray] reveals that he worked as an editor of the trade magazine Electronics
- It is speculative but plausible to guess that the 1965 release of the PDP-8 might have instigated Gray’s own home computer project and the later creation of the ACS.