Instead of making chips for very specific purposes, it designed a processor that could be used in any scenario. Launched as the Intel 8080, it would go on to be recognised as the world's first ...

Microsoft’s first software was created in two months — for a PC they didn’t own As they didn’t have an Intel 8080 chip—the one in the Altair 8800—Allen developed a simulator for it ...

Gates details some of the things they had to do to make Altair BASIC a real product, including not having actual access to the Intel 8080 chip that was in the Altair 8800, how to handle memory ...

Whereas SRAM chips can be more or less directly hooked ... logic that generated the proper signals to interface with the 8080 and 8085 CPUs. For the Z80, [Scott] dived into the documentation ...