Several storage options were offered including paper tape, cassette tape, and both 5.25″ and 8″ disks. The Altair 8800 did not come with an operating system in ROM and required the user to start it up by using front panel switches turned on in a specific order. ROM was optional, and the most common one ordered for it was the Intel 1702 EPROMS at 256 Bytes. Initial speed for the Altair 8800 was 2 MHz. The processor was the Intel 8080 or 8080a. Their company went from 20 employees to 90 in less than a year to keep up with demand.
The sales of their Altair 8800 were so beyond their initial expectations that they had to hire more than quadruple their starting staff to maintain orders. The company soon began taking off when it released its MITS Altair 8800 in 1975. They worked out of Roberts’ garage and initially worked on and sold transmitters, model rockets, and calculators. The MITS company was founded by Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims, two friends who had worked at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, in 1969. The DIY kit originally sold for $439, but MITS also sold assembled Altair 8800s for $621. The extra orders that pushed the sales over initial projections were from people and businesses who wanted a computer already assembled. The Altair 8800 was originally marketed towards hobbyists who enjoyed putting together their own electronics, and the computer was sold as DIY kit with parts and circuit boards buyers could put together themselves. MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) had hoped to sell a couple of hundred to hobbyists and enthusiasts and were shocked when their niche hobby computer sold thousands in the very first month. The MITS Altair 8800 was a computer sold in 1975 through popular hobbyist magazines like Radio-Electronics, and Popular Electronics.
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