The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics comes out, proudly announcing the “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models…”, the Altair 8800. Altair had hoped to clear a few hundred orders to pay for the actual purchase of the needed parts to sell, but instead, the system was so popular from the article that it received over four hundred orders in one afternoon. The cover’s image was a mock-up due to the working model being lost en route to Popular Electronics.

The first microcomputer implementation of BASIC by Bill Gates and Paul Allen was written for the MITS Altair, which led to Microsoft’s formation later in the year.

Gordon French hosts the Homebrew Computer Club’s first meeting in his garage on March 5, 1975.

Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Sony introduced the Betamax video cassette tape recorder on May 10, 1975.

May 31, 1975: The European Space Agency is formed.

EPSON entered the US market in 1975.

1975: The first broadcast of Starsky & Hutch, Baretta, Barney Miller, Fawlty Towers, Good Morning America, One Day at a Time, Saturday Night Live, Space: 1999, The Jeffersons, Welcome Back, Kotter, Wheel of Fortune, and Wonder Woman.

1975 Software:

Altair BASIC is a discontinued interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft’s first product (as Micro-Soft), distributed by MITS under a contract. Altair BASIC was the start of the Microsoft BASIC product range.

Ikarus is a type of design and production software developed by URW foundry for converting existing typefaces and logos into digital format for computer-driven printing, plotting, and sign-cutting devices.

Appearing in Version 7, Unix was originally written by Stephen C. Johnson of Bell Labs in 1975. Douglas McIlroy later improved its accuracy, performance, and memory use and described his work and spell in general in his 1982 paper “Development of a Spelling list.”

1975 Game Companies:

Cinematronics Incorporated was an arcade game developer that primarily released vector graphics games in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While other companies released games based on raster displays, early in their history, Cinematronics and Atari, Inc. released vector-display games, which offered a distinctive look and a greater graphic capability (at the time), at the cost of being only black and white (initially). Cinematronics also published Dragon’s Lair in 1983, the first major LaserDisc video game.

Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. is a Japanese video game holding company and entertainment conglomerate, best known for its Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Kingdom Hearts role-playing video game franchises, among numerous others.