Altair BASIC was an early programming language and the first product of Microsoft (then called Micro-Soft). Bill Gates (who was still at Harvard at the time) and Paul Allen apparently read about the Altair personal computer system in a science magazine and thought that making software for it could be a good business. You got that one right, boys.

This 1975 advertisement offers the Altair 8800 computer loaded with the MS guys’ basic language for the relatively inexpensive price of $995. In order to save records, you would hook up this computer to a cassette recorder and store the info on cassette tapes. The MITS (Micro Instruments and Telemetry Systems) company of Albuquerque, NM, distributed the computer and software. MITS was founded in 1971 as a calculator manufacturer and added computers to their inventory in 1975, so this was one of their first attempts at selling PCs. The Altair 8800 was the first commercially successful home computer and the Information Age was off and running. MITS co-founder Ed Roberts, who had earlier served in the Air Force for ten years, sold the company to Pertec Computer Corporation in 1976. He subsequently went to medical school and today practices medicine in a small town in Georgia.