Popular Electronics in the context of BASIC

Experimenter Publishing was an American media company founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1915. The first magazine was The Electrical Experimenter (1913–1931) and the most notable magazines were Radio News (1919–1985) and Amazing Stories (1926–2005). Their radio station, WRNY, began broadcasting experimental television in 1928. In early 1929 the company was forced into bankruptcy and the Gernsback brothers lost control of Experimenter Publishing. The magazines did not miss an issue and were quickly sold to another publisher. The Gernsbacks promptly started new magazines to compete with their former ones.

Radio News became Popular Electronics and the January 1975 issue featured the Altair 8800 computer on the cover; this launched the personal computer revolution. Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories is regarded as the first dedicated science fiction magazine and every year World Science Fiction Society gives the Hugo Awards for the best science fiction and fantasy works.

The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer introduced in 1974 by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) based on the Intel 8080 CPU. It was the first commercially successful personal computer. Interest in the Altair 8800 grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. It was sold by mail order through advertisements in Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics, and in other hobbyist magazines. The Altair 8800 had no built-in screen or video output, so it would have to be connected to a serial terminal or teletype to have any output. To connect it to a terminal, a serial interface card had to be installed. Alternatively, the Altair could be programmed using its front-panel switches.

According to the personal computer pioneer Harry Garland, the Altair 8800 was the product that catalyzed the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. The computer bus designed for the Altair became a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.