Edward Roberts was the inventor in 1974 of the Altair 8800, the first commercially successful microcomputer. His firm was called MITS and was based in Albuquerque. The Altair used a 2 MHz Intel 8080 CPU and had an “Altair bus” (later renamed the S-100 bus by someone else which was a sore point for Ed Roberts) and a 1K memory board with 256 bytes of static memory (SRAM). The front panel had switches and lights and was modeled on the Data General Nova-2. The kit cost $395. You could also get it assembled for $498. But to do anything useful you had to buy add-ons like 4K SRAM and DRAM boards, serial I/O boards and a teletype (new ASR-33’s cost much more than the computer) which could read and write paper tape. It was featured on the cover of the January 1975 edition of 
Popular Electronics. Over 10,000 Altairs were sold. There’s a fascinating interview about the MITS days with a memorable quote from Ed Roberts “To have a computer in the old days was better than sex; it was really something exciting.”
An Altair clone, the IMSAI 8080, came out in 1975, and the Sol-20, Apple 1 and Cromemco Z-1 in 1976. The first seriously commercially successful microcomputers Apple II, Commodore PET, TRS-80, and Northstar Horizon were released in 1977. In 1979, Heathkit released the H89, which is the first computer I built. The H89 had a Z80 processor from Zilog, which supported the 8080 instruction set with extensions, had 48K and ran the CPM-80 disk operating system. Then in 1981 the IBM Personal Computer came out and changed the world.
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