Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, Inc. (MITS), was an American electronics company founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico that began manufacturing electronic calculators in 1971 and personal computers in 1975.
Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims founded MITS in December 1969 to produce miniaturized telemetry modules for model rockets such as a roll rate sensor.The editor describes the first MITS modules with photo of the units. In 1971, Roberts redirected the company into the electronic calculator market and the MITS 816 desktop calculator kit was featured on the November 1971 cover of Popular Electronics. The calculators were very successful and sales topped one million dollars in 1973. A brutal calculator price war left the company deeply in debt by 1974.
Roberts then developed the first commercially successful microcomputer, the Altair 8800, which was featured on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics. Hobbyists flooded MITS with orders for the $397 computer kit. Paul Allen and Bill Gates saw the magazine and began writing software for the Altair, later called Altair BASIC. They moved to Albuquerque to work for MITS and in July 1975 started Microsoft.
MITS's annual sales had reached $6 million by 1977 when they were acquired by Pertec Computer. The operations were soon merged into the larger company and the MITS brand disappeared. Roberts retired to Georgia where he studied medicine and became a small town medical doctor.
Origin
Founders Henry Edward Roberts studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Miami before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force in 1962. He soon became an electronics instructor at the Cryptographic Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. To augment his meager enlisted man's pay, Roberts worked on several off-duty projects and even set up a one-man company, Reliance Engineering. The most notable job was to create the electronics that animated the Christmas characters in the window display of Joske's department store in San Antonio. In 1965, he was selected for an Air Force program to complete his college degree, and became a commissioned officer. Roberts earned an Electrical Engineering degree from Oklahoma State University in 1968 and was assigned to the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Forrest Mims was interested in science and electronics as a youth and even built an analog computer while in high school.Mims describes the analog computer he built in high school. The article has a photograph and schematics of the computer. Mims graduated from Texas A&M University in 1966 (major in government with minors in English and history) then became a commissioned officer in the U.S. Air Force. While serving in Vietnam as an intelligence officer, Mims continued his model rocket hobby. At Texas A&M, Mims developed an infrared obstacle-sensing device and he experimented with it at the Saigon School for Blind Boys and Girls. Launching model rockets in an area accustomed to rocket attacks and working with blind children resulted in a story in the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. This caught the attention of an Air Force Colonel, who arranged for Mims to be assigned to the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB even though Mims lacked an engineering degree.
Roberts and Mims were both assigned to the Lab's Laser Group in 1968. Roberts had reactivated Reliance Engineering and built an infrared intrusion alarm for his uncle's fish farm in Florida. Later, Roberts and Stan Cagle, a civilian worker who also went to Oklahoma State, started building a power supply they hoped to sell. Mims became an advisor to the Albuquerque Model Rocket Club and met George J. Flynn, the publisher of Model Rocketry magazine, in July 1969. Mims told him about a transistorized tracking light that he had used on night launches of rockets in Vietnam. This led to an article in the September 1969 issue of Model Rocketry; "Transistorized Tracking Light for Night Launched Model Rockets" by Captain Forrest Mims. Mims became a regular contributor to Model Rocketry.
Model rocket kits
Crewed space flight and the race to the moon in the 1960s made model rocketry a popular hobby. Roberts, Mims, Cagle and another Air Force officer from the Lab, Bob Zaller, decided they could design and sell electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists. Summary: Feature story on Albuquerque Model Rocketry Club. The club was organized by Air Force Captain Forrest Mims. Mims and three other Albuquerque engineers, Ed Roberts, Dan Cagle and Robert Zaller, have formed a new company, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. Roberts wanted to call the new company Reliance Engineering, Mims wanted to form an acronym similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT. Cagle came up with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, MITS. The December 1969 issue of Model Rocketry (circulation 15,000) carried a press release that began: Reliance Engineering in Albuquerque, New Mexico has announced the formation of a subsidiary company for the manufacture of miniaturized electronic and telemetry systems designed for model rockets. The company is called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). Reliance Engineering president Henry Roberts announced that "MITS is presently conducting an intensive research program involving high quality miniature telemetry systems." The first commercially available model rocket telemetry transmitter is among the first items to be offered by MITS. Accessory modules including a tone beacon, temperature sensor, and a roll rate sensor, as well as tracking lights, ground systems for data reduction, and light weight, water activated batteries will soon be available.
They designed and built the telemetry modules in their homes and garages but they were only able to sell a few hundred units. Mims had sold a feature article about the new solid-state device, light-emitting diodes, to Popular Electronics (circulation 400,000) that May. With the hope of selling kits to the larger readership; Roberts and Mims designed a device that would transmit voice over a beam of light, the Opticom. The editors accepted the project story and both articles were featured on the cover of the November 1970 issue. The payment for the articles was $400 but meeting Les Solomon, Popular Electronics technical editor, proved to be significant to both Mims and Roberts future success.
In August 1970, Les Solomon, his wife and daughter were on vacation in the southwest and arranged to visit Mims, Roberts and their families. At that time, Dan Meyer and Don Lancaster were among the most prolific authors in Popular Electronics. Meyer had built a million dollar a year business that sold kits of parts to build the project that he and Lancaster wrote about. Mims and Roberts wanted to do the same and quizzed Solomon on the kit business. Solomon gave them some statistics but said there was no way of knowing how many kits an article would sell, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand.
MITS had purchased components to build 200 Opticoms but only sold around 100 units. Roberts wanted to design a new electronic calculator kit but his partners wanted out. Bob Zaller had already left MITS and Forrest Mims was out of the Air Force and wanted to become a full-time writer. Roberts bought his 3 partners out for $600 in cash and $350 in equipment. (Roberts's four-year commitment to the Air Force ended in mid-1972.) Mims and Roberts remained friends and collaborated on books, magazines and instruction manuals.
Calculators
Ed Roberts's interest in computers began in high school when he built a simple digital computer from relays. His first real experience with computers came while at Oklahoma State University where engineering students had free access to an IBM 1620 computer. Roberts's office at Weapons Laboratory had the state of the art Hewlett-Packard 9100A programmable calculator in 1968. In July 1970, a semiconductor company, Electronic Arrays, announced a set of six LSI ICs that would make a four-function calculator. The Electronic Arrays, Inc. calculator chip set that was used in the MITS 816 calculator. Roberts was determined to design a calculator kit.
To fund the new project, Roberts sold 15% of MITS to fellow Air Force officer, Lieutenant William Yates. He also got an investment from another Weapons Laboratory officer, Major Ed Laughlin. Several other officers and scientists at the lab were interested in this state of the art calculator kit and helped with the design. Forrest Mims wrote the assembly manual in return for a calculator kit.
The MITS 816 was known as a "four-function" calculator; it could add, subtract, multiply and divide. The display was only 8 digits but the calculations were done to 16 digits of accuracy. The custom molded case gave the kit a professional appearance; the kit was $179 and an assembled unit was $275. The MITS 816 was featured on the November 1971 cover of Popular Electronics. Thousands of calculator orders came in each month, in contrast to poor results for previous kits that MITS had offered.
The steady flow of calculator sales allowed MITS to run full page advertisements in Radio-Electronics, Popular Electronics and Scientific American. In the June 1972 Radio-Electronics, MITS announced a 14 digit calculator (Model 1440) with memory and square root function for $199.95 kit and $249.95 assembled. The original 816 kit was reduced from $179 to $149.95. Both calculators could be controlled by upcoming programming unit. Full page advertisement of the Model 1440 calculator.
The monthly sales reached $100,000 in March 1973 and MITS moved to larger building with 10,000 square feet (930 square meters) of space. Summary: MITS to move to the Cal-Lin Building, 6328 Linn NE in May. Now at 5404 Coal SE. Employment is expected to rise from 62 to 180 or 200. Company will have 10,000 square feet on one floor. Calculator sales reached $100,000 in March. To meet the demand for assembled calculators, an automated wave solder machine was installed. The "Calculator Manufacturing" section describes in detail how MITS produces calculators and has 10 photographs of the process. In 1973 MITS was selling every calculator they could make; 110 employees worked in two shifts assembling calculators.
The functionality of calculator ICs increased at a rapid pace and Roberts was designing and producing new models. The MITS 7400 scientific and engineering calculator was introduced in December 1972. It featured trigonometric functions, polar to rectangular conversion, two memories, and up to a seven-level stack. A kit with a three-level stack was $299.95 and an assembled unit with a seven-level stack was $419.95. Full page advertisement of the Model 7400 scientific calculator. The next month the Series 1200 four-function pocket calculators were announced. The six-digit model was $59.95 and the twelve-digit model was $99.95.
The Programmer accessory had been mentioned in the earliest advertisement but it was not featured until March 1974. This was the same size as a desktop calculator and could hold 256 programming steps. (It could be expanded to 512 steps.) It was limited to emulating calculator key presses and simple sequence branching. The programming was done by entering hexadecimal key codes. The combination of the MITS 7440 calculator and the programmer was not nearly as sophisticated as the HP 9830 calculator but $400 for both kits was a fraction of the HP price.
MITS calculators The feature and price information is from advertisements in Radio-Electronics magazine (issue date shown). The 816 price is from the original article in Popular Electronics.