A 22-year-old Altair 8800b PC bought for $1,300 in 1976 was the winner of Dell Computer Corp’s Search for the Oldest PC competition, and was officially retired at the Computer Museum of America in Las Mesa, California on Thursday. The system was still being used by Winnetka, Illinois lawyer John C Shepard to create wills and other legal documents until he won the competition. It was one of 209 machines entered. Shepard gets a Dell server and combination of desktop and notebook PCs worth $15,000 in return for leaving the Altair at the museum.
The earliest PC is generally recognized as an Altair kit sold by Ed Roberts’ Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems Inc through Popular Electronics magazine in December 1974. It included a 2MHz Intel 8080 processor, 256 bytes of memory, and cost $395 or $495. It had no keyboard and no monitor, and programmers operated the machine via a front panel consisting of 25 toggle switches and 36 LEDs. Despite this, 4,000 Altair 8000s were sold in the first three months.
