The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics introduced the Altair 8800 and hit the newsstands ... There’s a backplane board (about $100) as well as a few boards to fit it available for about ...

If you aren’t old enough to remember when computers had front panels, as [Patrick Jackson] found out after he built a replica Altair 8800 ... available to the FPGA board it lived on.

Popular Electronics features the MITS Altair 8800 on its cover, January 1975. It is hailed as the first "personal" computer. Thousands of orders for the 8800 rescue MITS from bankruptcy.

In January 1975, Bill Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen read an article in the magazine Popular Electronics about the Altair 8800 home computer by a small company named MITS.