History
In May 1972, William Millard started businesses individually as IMS Associates (IMS) in the areas of computer consulting and engineering, using his home as an office. By 1973, Millard founded IMS Associates, Inc. Millard soon found capital for his business, and received several contracts, all for software.
In 1974, IMS was contacted by a client which wanted a "workstation system" that could complete jobs for any General Motors new-car dealership. IMS planned a system including a terminal, small computer, printer, and special software. Five of these work stations were to have common access to a hard disk drive, which would be controlled by a small computer. Eventually product development was stopped.
Millard and his chief engineer Joe Killian turned to the microprocessor. Intel had announced the 8080 chip, and compared to the 4004 to which IMS Associates had been first introduced, the 8080 looked like a "real computer". Full scale development of the IMSAI 8080 was put into action (using the existing Altair 8800's S-100 bus), and by October 1975 an ad was placed in Popular Electronics, receiving positive reactions.
IMS shipped the first IMSAI 8080 kits on 16 December 1975 before turning to fully assembled units. In 1976, IMS was renamed to IMSAI Manufacturing Corporation because by then, they were a manufacturing company, not a consulting firm.
In 1977, IMSAI marketing director Seymour I. Rubinstein paid Gary Kildall $25,000 for the right to run CP/M version 1.3, which eventually evolved into an operating system called IMDOS, on IMSAI 8080 computers. Other manufacturers followed and CP/M eventually became the de facto standard 8-bit operating system.
By October 1979, the IMSAI corporation was bankrupt. The 'IMSAI' trademark was acquired by Thomas "Todd" Fischer and Nancy Freitas (former early employees of IMS Associates), who continued manufacturing the computers under the IMSAI name as a division of Fischer-Freitas Co. Support for early IMSAI systems continues to this day.
Read more about this topic: IMSAI 8080
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