When Hollywood casting directors needed a personal computer for the teenage hacker’s bedroom in a 1983 thriller called War Games, they didn’t choose the newest or most powerful machine on the market. They chose the IMSAI 8080, a machine built seven years earlier in San Leandro, California, by a company that had filed for bankruptcy in October 1979. A dead company could not negotiate a product placement fee, demand script approval, or sue. So the IMSAI 8080, a computer abandoned by its own maker, became the most recognized personal computer in American cinema.
Its front panel, a row of twenty-two alternating blue and red paddle switches set against brushed aluminum, defined for an entire generation what a computer in a bedroom was supposed to look like. The man behind IMSAI was William Millard. Born in 1932, Millard never earned a college degree. Before computers, he had been a ditch digger, a truck driver, and a welder’s helper.
In the California of the 1950s, dominated by aerospace and electronics firms drawing on Stanford and Berkeley graduates, that lack of credentials was a wall. But Millard had an instinct for systems and a relentlessness that compensated for formal education. He went to work for IBM as a salesman and by 1961 had built the first computerized police information network for Alameda County, linking precincts across the East Bay to a central database. He left IBM convinced he could build his own company.
In 1969, he co-founded a software firm called Systems Dynamics with his wife, chasing mainframe consulting contracts. The company overextended and went bankrupt in 1972. Millard was forty, broke, and searching for something to believe in. What he found was Werner Erhard, the former car salesman turned self-help impresario whose consciousness-raising program, known simply as EST, promised that total responsibility for one’s circumstances made a person the creator of his own life.
Millard absorbed the philosophy completely. He would later require employees to attend EST sessions and push executives through mountaineering courses designed to break their fears. Former employees described a culture running on both exhilaration and anxiety. One recalled love and real caring and honesty.
Another said the team saw itself as on a mission from God. It was the kind of thinking that builds empires fast, and the kind that cannot recognize a crack in the foundation until the whole structure is falling. In May 1972, Millard began again with freelance computer consulting from home. By 1973, he had incorporated as IMS Associates, with IMS standing for Information Management Sciences.
The company had no product and no hardware, only contracts and two part-time employees. One was a programmer named Bruce Vanatta. The other was a physicist and electrical engineer named Joe Killian, hired at $12. 50 an hour.
Killian was quiet and methodical, the kind of engineer who understands physics first and the market second. He was the third employee of a consulting shop that had never built a computer. Within eighteen months, he would design the machine that made IMS Associates famous. In late 1974, the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics hit newsstands with a blue and gray metal box on its cover: the Altair 8800.
Ed Roberts, a former Air Force officer running a struggling calculator company called MITS in Albuquerque, had designed it around the Intel 8080 microprocessor as a last-ditch effort to save his business. The kit cost $439. It could do almost nothing out of the box, had no keyboard, no screen, no storage. You programmed it by flipping toggle switches and read output through blinking red LEDs.
But it was a real computer and it cost less than a used car. Orders overwhelmed MITS within weeks. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for it that became the first product of a company they called Microsoft. The Altair did not just launch a computer; it launched an industry.
Millard and Killian saw the Altair as the answer to a contract problem. IMS Associates was building a computer networking system for car dealerships, and the available mini computers cost thousands of dollars, designed for institutional budgets. A machine built around the same Intel chip could replace them at a fraction of the price. They tried to buy Altairs in volume, but MITS, drowning in its own backlog, offered neither quantity discounts nor reliable delivery dates.
The decision that created the IMSAI 8080 was born from impatience. If MITS would not ship them an Altair, they would build their own. Killian did not simply copy Roberts’s design. He kept what worked and fixed what did not.
He adopted the Altair’s 100-pin edge connector bus, which would become the S100 standard, meaning every peripheral card and piece of software being developed for the Altair would also work on the IMSAI. But he made significant improvements. He designed a single motherboard where the Altair used a segmented board requiring hand wiring between sections. He rotated the card slots ninety degrees so the front panel became just another card plugged into the bus.
And he built a power supply delivering twenty to thirty amps at five volts, where the Altair supply struggled at eight. In practice, that was the difference between a machine that ran reliably with a full complement of memory cards and one that browned out under load. The IMSAI 8080 was the first clone in personal computing history, and it was better than the original. Then there was the front panel.
Where the Altair used uniform red toggle switches, Killian chose alternating blue and red paddle switches, wider and more substantial, set into a brushed aluminum face plate. The choice was purely cosmetic. It had no effect on performance, but it gave the IMSAI an identity the Altair never achieved. The Altair looked like a piece of test equipment.
The IMSAI looked like it meant business. IMS Associates advertised the IMSAI 8080 in Popular Electronics beginning in October 1975. The kit cost $439; an assembled unit cost $621. To a median household in 1975, that was two weeks of take-home pay.
The first fifty kits shipped on December 16, 1975. By April 1976, the company was generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Orders outpaced the team in San Leandro’s ability to assemble them. Millard’s EST-fueled philosophy demanded total commitment and total hours.
Family members were brought in to help with assembly. Around this time, Millard brought in Seymour Rubinstein as director of marketing, a Brooklyn-born former television repairman who had worked on classified naval systems. A programmer named Rob Barnaby joined around the same time. Neither stayed long.
Both left to co-found MicroPro International, where Barnaby wrote WordStar, the word processor that turned the personal computer from a hobbyist curiosity into a tool for writers and businesses worldwide. The company that gave them their start never saw a cent of it. Millard’s attention was already drifting. In 1976, he partnered with a former IBM manager named Ed Faber to open a retail computer store in Hayward, California.
They called it Computer Shack, selling not only the IMSAI but machines from Apple, Northstar, and Cromemco. After Radio Shack’s lawyers objected to the name, it became Computerland. Millard turned it into a franchise. Each franchisee paid an initial fee and agreed to source the vast majority of inventory through Computerland’s central purchasing.
By the end of 1977, there were stores in a dozen cities. By early 1978, the count was accelerating toward one hundred. The economics were seductive. A manufacturer lives and dies by its next product.
A franchise operator lives on fees from stores selling other companies’ products. Millard began to see IMS Associates not as a computer manufacturer with a retail sideline, but as a retail operation with a factory it might not need much longer. The timing was shaped by forces larger than any single company. In 1977, the personal computer stopped being a hobbyist pursuit and became a consumer product.
Apple released the Apple II with a built-in keyboard, color graphics, and a case designed for a desk. Tandy launched the TRS-80 through its nationwide Radio Shack chain. Commodore shipped the PET with a built-in monitor. These were not kits.
They did not require soldering. They cost roughly what an IMSAI cost, sometimes less. The era of front panel switches was no longer the center of the industry. By the end of 1977, Apple had sold tens of thousands of Apple IIs.
Radio Shack sold over ten thousand TRS-80s in its first month. The IMSAI 8080, with lifetime production of roughly twenty thousand units spread over three years, was being outpaced by consumer machines in weeks. The IMSAI’s golden age was short but intense. Between 1976 and 1978, IMS Associates shipped between seventeen and twenty thousand units.
Every one went to someone who knew what a bus was, who understood why a thirty-amp power supply mattered, who could open the steel cabinet and slot a new card into one of the twenty-two S100 connectors. If you bought the kit, the experience began with a cardboard box heavy enough to require both hands. You built the machine yourself, connection by connection, testing as you went. When you flipped the power switch and the LEDs lit up, the machine was something you had made with your own hands.
That bond lasted decades. Killian’s engineering was built to last. People who built these machines in 1976 are still running them today, nearly fifty years later. But the machine was already being orphaned by the company that sold it.
Computerland was growing faster than IMSAI manufacturing ever had. Resources that should have funded the next generation of IMSAI hardware were redirected to opening more stores. A successor machine, the VDP-80, shipped late, sold poorly, and was discontinued. The engineers understood what was happening.
The money was going to Computerland. The research budget was going to Computerland. The factory that built the IMSAI 8080 was being hollowed out to feed a retail chain that sold other companies’ products. In an EST-driven culture that treated obstacles as failures of commitment, telling the founder his strategy was killing the product was indistinguishable from admitting you were not committed enough.
In October 1979, IMS Associates filed for bankruptcy. Two former employees acquired the IMSAI trademark and continued manufacturing roughly 2,200 more systems through 1986 for the devoted community that still wanted them. Computerland became enormous. In 1981, IBM selected it as one of three retail outlets authorized to sell the IBM PC.
By 1982, annual sales exceeded $400 million. By 1984, they surpassed $1 billion. At its peak, Computerland operated roughly 800 stores. Millard’s personal stake was valued at over $1 billion.
Then the lawsuits arrived. In the early days of IMS Associates, Millard had pledged 20 percent of the company’s stock as a convertible note to an investment firm called Mariner and Company in exchange for $250,000. That claim on a quarter-million-dollar investment had become a claim on a significant piece of a billion-dollar retail empire. The resulting litigation ended with a $141 million judgment against Millard.
In 1987, he sold Computerland to private equity firm Warburg Pincus for approximately $200 million. The empire he had built by abandoning the IMSAI sold for less than the cost of the judgment. Most of the 800 stores had closed by 1990, casualties of the same force that had made them necessary: personal computers had become cheap and simple enough that customers no longer needed a specialized store. Millard left the country, moving first to Saipan, then to the Cayman Islands.
In 2013, he and his wife filed for bankruptcy protection there, owing $118 million in unpaid taxes and interest. The man who built IMSAI and Computerland ended as a tax exile in the Caribbean, bankrupt for the second time in his life, while the $439 kit computer he abandoned sat in museums on three continents. In June 1983, War Games opened in American theaters on a budget of $12 million. It earned $124.
6 million worldwide, the fifth highest grossing film of the year. The IMSAI 8080 was not a background prop; it was the vehicle of the plot. Todd Fischer, the same man who had acquired the IMSAI trademark after bankruptcy, provided the computer and floppy drives to the production. The most telling detail of its Hollywood career is one the audience never knew.
The text scrolling across the monitor was not generated by the IMSAI. A faster CompuPro system sat hidden out of frame, triggered by keystrokes on the IMSAI’s programmable keyboard, producing the display in real time. The most famous personal computer in film history was not even running during its most famous scene. What the audience took away was real enough.
War Games told Americans that a teenager with a computer and a phone line could reach into systems that were supposed to be secure. President Ronald Reagan watched the film at Camp David and, by multiple accounts, was visibly shaken. He raised the film’s scenario with his national security advisers and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They confirmed the premise was technically plausible.
Eighteen months later, Reagan signed NSDD 145, the first presidential directive on computer security in American history. The film also helped catalyze the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, the first federal law criminalizing unauthorized computer access. A movie about a teenager hacking a military supercomputer with an IMSAI 8080 changed the law of the United States. Today, working IMSAI 8080s sell at auction for $2,000 to $5,000 and sometimes considerably more.
The original War Games prop was appraised in 2010 at well over $25,000. The S100 community is still active, trading boards on forums, restoring dead machines, and writing new software for hardware that has not been manufactured in decades. At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, an IMSAI 8080 sits in the permanent collection. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View has the documentation archived.
The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, England, has a restored unit on display. Killian chose those blue and red colors because they looked right on the face plate he was designing for a machine that was supposed to be a cheaper alternative to an Altair. A Hollywood production team chose that machine because the company behind it was dead and could not object. The company that built the IMSAI is gone.
The man who founded it abandoned it for a franchise empire that made him a billionaire and then collapsed. The billion is gone. But the machine is still here. It boots.
It runs. Collectors keep it alive. And for anyone who has ever seen War Games, it remains the image of what a computer looked like when computers were still strange, and personal in the way that only a machine you built with your own hands can be.
