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| class ="wikitable" align="right" width=250 History In May 1972, Bill Millard began business individually as IMS Associates (IMS) in the area of computer consultancy 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, 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, and by 1975 an ad was placed in Popular Electronics, receiving positive reactions. IMS shipped the first IMSAI 8080 kits on December 16, 1975. In 1976, IMS was renamed to IMSAI Manufacturing Corporation because by then they were a manufacturing company, not a consultancy firm. By October 1979 the IMSAI corporation had gone bankrupt, and the 'IMSAI' trademark was sold to Fisher-Freitas Co, who continued manufacturing the computers under the IMSAI name; however these models are different than the originals produced by IMS and IMSAI Manufacturing Corporation. Uses The IMSAI 8080 was used for: IMSAI in popular culture An IMSAI 8080 and an acoustic coupler type modem were among the hacking tools used by the main character in the 1983 movie WarGames. However, even by 1983 the acoustic coupler was out of date. It was selected over a more modern model so that the audience would immediately recognize it as the device that interfaced with the telephone. Footnotes | |||||||
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