Altair (256 bytes was the starting amount of memory). I could toggle these
switches, punch some buttons, get ones and zeros into memory and run it as a
program, and I could verify it really was in there and running. So I had done
this 5 years before. Now I saw the Altair and I saw the microprocessors and I
knew that they weren’t enough. You needed something to run a whole computer
language. But it was close.
So I searched around. My thinking was always, in making something possible,
you’ve got to get it down to a reasonable cost, but I needed 4K bytes of
RAM minimum. The first dynamic RAMs got introduced that year, 1975—the
first 4K dynamic RAMs. That was the first time ever that RAMs were lower in
price than magnetic core memories, which every computer up to that day had
used. So all of a sudden, the world was going to change to RAMs. Silicon was
going to be our memory.
Everybody else in the world—the Altair, the Sphere computers, the
Polymorphic computers, the Insight computers—every one was designed by
basically insufficient engineers, not top-quality engineers. They were designed
by technicians who knew how to look at the datasheets for some RAM, look at
the datasheets for a microprocessor and see if the microprocessor had some
lines called “address”—and the RAMs had lines called “address,” and they
would hook a wire from one to the other. It’s a very simple job—if your RAMs
are static RAMs.

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