Comment by watersb
5 hours ago
The first personal computer generally available in the United States, the MITS Altair, grew out of projects like this.
MITS was an acronym: "Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems". Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims made electronics kits for model rockets.
As a 1970s kid, I built Estes rockets, but I never did anything fancy. You'd spend a week or two of free time, building the kit and painting it. Then you'd blow it up on the launch pad, or launch it into the wild blue and never see it again. Or spend all your birthday money on a Star Wars X-Wing fighter, launch it, and have it nose-dive into the dirt about ten feet away.
Come to think of it, model rocketry was exactly like real rocketry.
Forrest Mims enriched my life in other ways, with his patient lab manuals for the Radio Shack electronics kits.
Completely shared experiences with regards to both Forrest's books and Estes' rockets, except after enough losses of the latter I got pretty fatalistic about new rockets. They were assembled and flown same day as soon as the glue dried, with maybe a slapdash decal; there wasn't much point investing too much time or energy when the wind or a tree was going to take them anyway.
And of course Bill Gates and Paul Allen started their company to write BASIC for the MITS Altair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Instrumentation_and_Tele...