Dec. 19, 1974: Build Your Own Computer at Home!

1974: The Altair 8800 microcomputer goes on sale. It doesn't offer much, but it's the small start of a big trend toward small things. At its heart was the Intel 8080 microprocessor, with the remarkable capacity of 8 bits, or 1 byte. The kit offered a 256-byte memory, just about enough to contain one sentence of text.