Ed Roberts' Altair 8080 construction-kit costed a little less than $400, you had to assemble the computer yourself. Because of the low price this was the first computer available for the avarage man. The processor was a 500 Hz Intel 8080 and the RAM was 256 bytes. Input was made by switches and output by LEDs. Bill Gates (who had not yet founded Microsoft) wrote "Tiny Basic" for this computer. The name Altair origins from "Star Trek".