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Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) was an Albuquerque, New Mexico company founded in 1968 by Forrest Mims and Ed Roberts. Initially MITS was in the calculator business until 1972 when Texas Instruments began to dominate the low cost calculator market. MITS also made instrumentation kits for model rockets and RC vehicles. MITS is best known for creating the Altair 8800, and is commonly credited for starting the home computer industry.
Altair
In the early 1970s, MITS was close to going bankrupt, due to disappointing calculator sales. MITS developed the Altair 8800, one of the first hobbyist microcomputer kits in 1973 and 1974 using the Intel 8080 microprocessor. The Altair 8800 was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. For a very brief time, MITS employed Bill Gates and Paul Allen as its software division, writing BASIC interpreters and other software for the Altair 8800 and its siblings before they left founded Microsoft as an independent compnay in 1975, and then moved it to Washington State.
MITS was overwhelmed by orders for the Altair 8800 after the cover story in Poular Electronics, and quickly ran into to quality problems with its memory boards. Shortly after the release of the Altair 8800 many other companies such as IMSAI began to release similar compatible products, making Roberts furious. Roberts demanded that the newly founded computer stores only sell the Altair 8800 and not any competitive products. This was a flawed strategy, and the company was sold for $6.5m USD to Pertec in May 1977 becoming one of the first casualties in the industry it spawned. Roberts went on to become a physician, and is in practice in Georgia. Mims has continued to work as a journalist in the electronics and scientific fields.
See also
External links
"Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems"