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

1974 (Wired): 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.
A small New Mexico company — with the big name of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems and the small name of MITS — manufactured the Altair as a do-it-yourself kit. At its heart was the Intel 8080 microprocessor, with the remarkable capacity of 8 bits, or 1 byte. Continued

Photo: Michael Holley/Wikipedia