Previous: 1974 / Next: 1976 View all of the years in the New Media Timeline                TECHNOLOGY In the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, the cover story describes the Altair 8800, the first successful personal computer. For $395 you can order a kit to build the Altair yourself or you can buy it assembled for $495. The Altair 8800 comes with 256 bytes of computer memory and uses Intel's 8080 processor. Excerpt from the January 1975 Popular Electronics column that introduced the Altair: "For many years, we've been reading and hearing about how computers will one day be a household item. Therefore, we're especially proud to present in this issue the first commercial type of minicomputer project ever published that's priced within reach of many households -- the Alair 8800...." Ed Roberts, the creator of the Altair personal computer, works with Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop Altair's first programming language. Their program is a version of the BASIC computer language. The partnership between Gates and Allen is the beginning of the Microsoft company. (See also: "Microsoft @ 30." History Timeline, Microsoft, 2005.) The ARPANET computer network is taken over by the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency.                 THE MEDIA French television begins testing its Antiope teletext service. Teletext is a text-only system without the interactivity and graphics of viewdata. The French viewdata system is called Minitel. The Manhattan Cable Television service begins using a videotex and teletext Reuters news system. A consumer version of The Reuters Monitor is carried on two New York cable channels. The CompuServe dial-up service becomes an independent, publicly held company. News Example: April/May 1975 -- The Fall of Saigon, New York Times. (Abstract available from the Infobank database service.) Additional Resources See Also: New Media Bibliography

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