I fondly remember prepping and drilling the Altair prototype motherboards while working for my father Dave Bryson. His small printed circuit business was called Circuits Unlimited, located just outside the Wyoming base gate. The size of the boards dwarfed the other boards we were making. We were all amazed at the amount of ICs that went on the boards. People still think that the PC started at IBM or in Silicon Valley, but I remember the little shop behind Starline Printing on the north end of Alnuquerque.

The opening date for STARTUP at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was Nov 18, 2006.  As a volunteer, it has been my honor to meet the players of MITS who visited during the grand opening.  Forrest Mims, his wife Mime, and Ed Roberts among the many. 

I was five years old when my dad's friend Frank bought a MITS Altair.  We lived a state away from where he was in Dallas, Texas, and would occasionally go to visit and see the amazing things he had done with the machine.  Most hobbyists were excited to have written programs to emit songs made from single beeping tones.  Frank figured out the machine code to modulate two tones together at the same time and get harmony, and even wrote a program to create unique music randomly.  It was very impressive.

He also created what I like to think was one of the first color printers.  One of the most unique, anyway.  It was all enclosed, and painted flat black.  Inside was a large pinhole camera kind of layout, on one side a larger chamber with a couple LEDs mounted on a movable platform.  Stepper motors controlled the X and Y axis to move around the LEDs, and the lights themselves could also be turned on and off programmatically.  Colors included red, yellow, orange, and green.  (No blue LEDs back then!)  On the other side of the pinhole was an Olympus camera mount, and with a camera attached the images got recorded on 35mm film.  So print times were pretty long, and page costs were pretty high -- 24 "pages" in a roll of film took at least a day to develop!  After writing some code to draw a picture, it would take a few minutes to roll the LEDs around in the pattern you had chosen.  After the code ran and the LED was off, you hand-cranked the film to the next position, modified your code a bit to "print" something different, and eventually go through a roll.  There were some pretty cool drawings that came out of that thing, looking kinda like a laser light show.  I'm sure the people developing the pictures were saying, "Wow, what in the heck is THAT?"  They probably thought we were holding open the shutter and playing with sparklers.

So it was fun to visit Frank and see his amazing inventions.  A few years later when I was nine, he got a great job over in Saudi Arabia, but couldn't take along his Altair.  Therefore, he gave it to us, along with a big teletype machine and a box of TTL parts.  I still remember him teaching me about shift registers and seven segment display decoders and such.  What a great time that was!  The start of my passion for computers.  My dad and I spent hours and hours with the Altair, and lots of time with the hardware as well.  Soon thereafter, we built a computer kit of our own: the Timex Sinclair, which was a $200 bag of parts from a company in England.  I owe a lot in my life to those humble beginnings.

Recently I had the opportunity to take a little trip down memory lane.  Last year I was awarded Microsoft's MVP status for the work I do to put together the code camp events in the Phoenix area.  At the big annual summit, there would be a chance to ask questions of Bill Gates.  I decided to try to find our old copy of Altair BASIC and bring it along.  I had forgotten if we had the 4K or 8K version, but I knew our Altair had 8K of RAM.  My dad dug through the storage shed and found the cassette tape and old manual we used, along with lots of our notes and Frank's code as well.  What a gem.  I brought it out to the MVP summit, and Bill signed it, talking a little bit about those good ol' days working with Paul to write the BASIC interpreter.  He also mentioned this museum, which is how I had found out about this site.  Some pictures on my blog of the original manual can be seen here:

http://geekswithblogs.net/lorint/archive/2007/03/14/108732.aspx

My career has been focused on computers ever since, and it has remained an immensely enjoyable part of my life.  Thanks go out to you for creating a gallery to commemorate the beginnings of home computing.

It was great to see Ed Roberts at the STARTUP! opening in November 2006. Even before we founded MITS in Ed's kitchen at 4809 Palo Duro NE in the fall of 1969, Ed had a vision for developing a truly personal computer. We used to spend hours discussing various approaches to designing a hobby computer. Making a simple computer from TTL integrated circuits was a possibility (I later did so), and we also discussed analog computers and even an LED version of the abacus. Little did either of us know that Intel would someday develop the 8080 microprocessor, which Ed immediately realized was the solution for which he had been looking and which quickly became the brain of the Altair 8800.

The STARTUP! exhibt is an amazing collection of memories of those days. Thanks to Paul Allen for conceiving the idea and providing the key sponsorship. Thanks to the Vulcan staff for their hard work developing the exhibit. And thanks to Dr. Adrian Hunt and his staff at the NMMHNS for hosting this remarkable exhibit.