How many altair computers were sold

Not so with lossless data compression. Bits do disappear, making the data file dramatically smaller and thus easier to store and transmit. The important difference is that the bits reappear on command. It's as if the bits are rabbits in a magician's act, disappearing and then reappearing from inside a hat at the wave of a wand. The world of magic had Houdini, who pioneered tricks that are still performed today. And data compression has Jacob Ziv.

LZ77 wasn't the first lossless compression algorithm, but it was the first that could work its magic in a single step. Photo: Rami Shlush. D, MIT, National Academy of Engineering, U. The following year, the two researchers issued a refinement, LZ Without these algorithms, we'd likely be mailing large data files on discs instead of sending them across the Internet with a click, buying our music on CDs instead of streaming it, and looking at Facebook feeds that don't have bouncing animated images.

Ziv went on to partner with other researchers on other innovations in compression. Ziv was born in to Russian immigrants in Tiberias, a city then in British-ruled Palestine and now part of Israel. Electricity and gadgets—and little else—fascinated him as a child. While practicing violin, for example, he came up with a scheme to turn his music stand into a lamp.

He also tried to build a Marconi transmitter from metal player-piano parts. When he plugged the contraption in, the entire house went dark. He never did get that transmitter to work. When the Arab-Israeli War began in , Ziv was in high school. Drafted into the Israel Defense Forces, he served briefly on the front lines until a group of mothers held organized protests, demanding that the youngest soldiers be sent elsewhere.

Ziv's reassignment took him to the Israeli Air Force, where he trained as a radar technician. When the war ended, he entered Technion—Israel Institute of Technology to study electrical engineering. After completing his master's degree in , Ziv returned to the defense world, this time joining Israel's National Defense Research Laboratory now Rafael Advanced Defense Systems to develop electronic components for use in missiles and other military systems.

The trouble was, Ziv recalls, that none of the engineers in the group, including himself, had more than a basic understanding of electronics. Their electrical engineering education had focused more on power systems. It wasn't enough. The group's goal was to build a telemetry system using transistors instead of vacuum tubes. They needed not only knowledge, but parts. Ziv contacted Bell Telephone Laboratories and requested a free sample of its transistor; the company sent In , Ziv was selected as one of a handful of researchers from Israel's defense lab to study abroad.

That program, he says, transformed the evolution of science in Israel. Its organizers didn't steer the selected young engineers and scientists into particular fields. Instead, they let them pursue any type of graduate studies in any Western nation. Ziv planned to continue working in communications, but he was no longer interested in just the hardware. He had recently read Information Theory Prentice-Hall, , one of the earliest books on the subject , by Stanford Goldman, and he decided to make information theory his focus.

And where else would one study information theory but MIT, where Claude Shannon, the field's pioneer, had started out? Ziv arrived in Cambridge, Mass. His Ph. So if you invest the computational effort, you can know you are approaching the best outcome possible. Ziv contrasts that certainty with the uncertainty of a deep-learning algorithm.

It may be clear that the algorithm is working, but nobody really knows whether it is the best result possible. He found this work less beautiful. That is why I didn't go into real computer science. Then in , with several other coworkers, he joined the faculty of Technion. Jacob Ziv with glasses , who became chair of Technion's electrical engineering department in the s, worked earlier on information theory with Moshe Zakai.

The two collaborated on a paper describing what became known as the Ziv-Zakai bound. The state of the art in lossless data compression at the time was Huffman coding.

This approach starts by finding sequences of bits in a data file and then sorting them by the frequency with which they appear. Then the encoder builds a dictionary in which the most common sequences are represented by the smallest number of bits.

That's a radical idea when computers are mostly inaccessible to ordinary people, and seen by the counterculture as tools of government and corporate power. It was an attempt to lower maintenance costs while bolstering disk drive reliability. It was initially released with a 5 MB capacity, and two years later a 10 MB version was put on the market. Also, head alignment tools were removed, as maintenance on these parts was costly and time-consuming. Future disk drives largely adopted this feature.

For its January issue, hobbyist magazine Popular Electronics runs a cover story of a new computer kit — the Altair Within weeks of its appearance, customers inundated its maker, MITS, with orders. Chuck Peddle leads a small team of former Motorola employees to build a low-cost microprocessor. The and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications.

Shortly before press time, the computer still did not have a name. Les Solomon liked to spin this yarn about his daughter naming it:. After dinner one night I asked my twelve year-old daughter, who was watching Star Trek, what the computer on the Enterprise was called. But Forrest Mims tells a less interesting although maybe more factual story: Solomon and other editors were discussing the name.

Altair is the 12th brightest star in the night sky. Despite the excitement at MITS and Popular Electronics, Roberts, even at his most optimistic, thought they could sell units they needed to sell units to break even. MITS was surprised to receive over 1, orders by the end of February, and over 2, by the end of May. MITS was overwhelmed and could not fill orders in a timely manner.

However, when they asked after 30 days if customers wanted refunds, everyone decided to wait. No one knows for sure how many Altair computers were sold, but Ed Roberts has said he sold 40, units before selling MITS to Pertec and leaving the computer business in