Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems

Founders

Henry Edward Roberts studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Miami before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force in 1962. He soon became an electronics instructor at the Cryptographic Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. 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. In 1965, he was selected for an Air Force program to complete his college degree, and became a commissioned officer. 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.

Forrest Mims was interested in science and electronics as a youth and even built an analog computer while in high school. 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. While serving in Vietnam as an intelligence officer, Mims continued his model rocket hobby. At Texas A&M, Mims developed an infrared obstacle-sensing device and he experimented with it at the Saigon School for Blind Boys and Girls. Launching model rockets in an area accustomed to rocket attacks and working with blind children resulted in a story in the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. This caught the attention of an Air Force Colonel, who arranged for Mims to be assigned to the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB even though Mims lacked an engineering degree.

Roberts and Mims were both assigned to the Lab's Laser Group in 1968. Roberts had reactivated Reliance Engineering and built an infrared intrusion alarm for his uncle's fish farm in Florida. Later, Roberts and Stan Cagle, a civilian worker who also went to Oklahoma State, started building a power supply they hoped to sell. Mims became an advisor to the Albuquerque Model Rocket Club and met George J. Flynn, the publisher of Model Rocketry magazine, in July 1969. Mims told him about a transistorized tracking light that he had used on night launches of rockets in Vietnam. This led to an article in the September 1969 issue of Model Rocketry; "Transistorized Tracking Light for Night Launched Model Rockets" by Captain Forrest Mims. Mims became a regular contributor to Model Rocketry.

Model rocket kits

Crewed space flight and the race to the moon in the 1960s made model rocketry a popular hobby. 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. Roberts wanted to call the new company Reliance Engineering, Mims wanted to form an acronym similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT. Cagle came up with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, MITS. The December 1969 issue of Model Rocketry (circulation 15,000) carried a press release that began:

Reliance Engineering in Albuquerque, New Mexico has announced the formation of a subsidiary company for the manufacture of miniaturized electronic and telemetry systems designed for model rockets. The company is called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). Reliance Engineering president Henry Roberts announced that "MITS is presently conducting an intensive research program involving high quality miniature telemetry systems."

The first commercially available model rocket telemetry transmitter is among the first items to be offered by MITS. Accessory modules including a tone beacon, temperature sensor, and a roll rate sensor, as well as tracking lights, ground systems for data reduction, and light weight, water activated batteries will soon be available.

They designed and built the telemetry modules in their homes and garages but they were only able to sell a few hundred units. Mims had sold a feature article about the new solid-state device, light-emitting diodes, to Popular Electronics (circulation 400,000) that May. 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 editors accepted the project story and both articles were featured on the cover of the November 1970 issue. 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. At that time, Dan Meyer and Don Lancaster were among the most prolific authors in Popular Electronics. Meyer had built a million dollar a year business that sold kits of parts to build the project that he and Lancaster wrote about. Mims and Roberts wanted to do the same and quizzed Solomon on the kit business. Solomon gave them some statistics but said there was no way of knowing how many kits an article would sell, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand.

Products

The Altair 8800 was modeled after early 1970s minicomputers such as the Data General Nova. These machines contained a CPU board, memory boards, and I/O boards; the data storage and display terminal were external devices. The Teletype Model 33 ASR was a popular terminal because it provided printed output and data storage on punched paper tape. More advanced systems would have 8-inch floppy disks and a video terminal that would display 24 lines of 80 characters such as the ADM-3A. (No graphics were available and lower-case letters were a $75 option.) Most of these computers had a front panel with toggle switches for entering data and lights for displaying it. These were normally used to boot the computer and to diagnose problems.

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. A 1k byte memory board was $176 and the 4k byte board was $264. The serial interface board was $124 and the parallel interface was $119. The Teletype Model 33 ASR was $1500. There was a special price for an 8k byte system with Altair BASIC (Microsoft's first ever product) for $995. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote Altair BASIC with Monte Davidoff contributing the Floating-point arithmetic routines. Altair BASIC initial developed from February 1975 to May 1975 and announced by MITS in July 1975, the 4k version on paper tape for $150, the 8k version with cassette support for $200 and the Extended 16k version with disk support (December 1975) for $350. To encourage selling more boards, Altair BASIC was discounted to $60, $75, $150 respectively, when bundled with 4k, 8k and I/O boards

When the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics reached readers in mid December 1974, MITS was flooded with orders. They had to hire extra people just to answer the phones. In February, MITS received 1,000 orders for the Altair 8800. The quoted delivery time was 60 days but it was many more months before the machines were shipped. By August 1975, they had shipped over 5,000 computers.

The Altair 8800 computer was a break-even sale for MITS. They needed to sell additional memory boards, I/O boards and other options to make a profit. The April 1975 issue of the MITS newsletter, Computer Notes, had a page-long price list that offered over 15 optional boards. The delivery time given was 60 or 90 days, but many items were never produced and dropped from future price lists. Initially, Roberts decided to concentrate on production of the computers. Prompt delivery of optional boards did not occur until October 1975.