The Tiny Missiles of October: How Model Rockets Spawned Your PC

Suppose I were to say tell you that, if it wasn’t for the model rocket hobby of the 1960s and 1970s, you wouldn’t be reading this article -- you would not own a PC, the internet would not exist, Suite101 would never have opened it’s doors, and the term dot.com would not be a part of our collective vocabulary.

All because of model rockets?

History is stranger than anything a fiction writer can dream up. The model rocket hobby, and the industry that supplied hobbyists with the nose cones, solid fuel motors and launch gantries, existed as a reflection of the American and Soviet government’s race to get there fastest, with the most stuff.

There, of course, is the moon. The rest of the exploration of the solar system would sort itself out, it was felt, but first things first. Get those Stars and Stripes/Hammer and Sickle on lunar soil, and do it pronto.

It’s amazing how ideological differences can motivate otherwise perfectly rational human beings, isn’t it?

So we wondered if the Russians would really beat us, and if the Americans could make Apollo work. We drank our Tang and journeyed with James Kirk and Starfleet, and we watched with awe the space walks and the moonwalks on the nightly news, and got to know Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong a little bit. Walter Kronkite was a part of the American consciousness, and the brooding facade of the Kremlin seemed to mock our attempts to conquer the stars. “They” had Sputnik and the first space walks. And it’s a certainty that the Soviets must have felt pretty much the same way as Mercury evolved into Gemini, and NASA moved closer and closer to the dream of a man on the moon’s surface.

So each weekend, fathers and sons and families would take their tiny rockets to the local parks and see how high they could make ‘em go. And because of that simple hobby, Bill Gates was able to give us the keys to the digital car and a map to the nearest information superhighway on-ramp.

Back in 1975, a company existed called MITS. This company had been around for a while, but their product and mission was transitioning. They had just come out with a new product, a kit that one could use to build their very own small personal computer. It was not much of a machine by today’s standards, but that is hindsight, and from where folks stood then, the Altair looked pretty good 25 years ago.

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