Parasitic Engineering's Equinox 100 Minicomputer

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Parasitic Engineering's Equinox 100 Minicomputer<br>When you put it together, it's really together.

John Paul Wohlscheid<br>Jun 13, 2026

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From the January 1978 issue of Interface Age magazine<br>The Company

I had a lot of fun researching this company. Every once in a while, I stumble upon a company that has quite a story.<br>Parasitic Engineering was founded by “two Oakland, California hobbyists”1 in 1975. Earlier that year, MITS had released a 4K memory board for the Altair. (At the time, the Altair was very popular among computer hobbyists.) Unfortunately, the boards just didn’t work. Ed Roberts, the founder and president of MITS, would not admit there was a problem and “brooked no complaints”.<br>In response to the faulty memory boards, an unemployed member of the Homebrew Computer Club, Bob Marsh, decided to start a company to make boards that worked. (The Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist club, who members included Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, George Morrow, Adam Osborne, Jerry Lawson, and other men who would go on to lay the foundation of the PC industry.)

From the November 1977 issue of Interface Age magazine<br>Roberts was not happy. MITS was making very little money on the Altair and the memory boards were a way to generate some badly needed revenue.2 For Roberts this was war. He decided to tie the price of the BASIC language, which was very popular at the time, to the memory boards. If you bought a memory board, BASIC cost $150. But if you wanted to buy just BASIC, you’d have to shell out $500. At the time, an Altair cost $439 as a kit or $621 assembled.<br>According to Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine (a must read), potential customers did not take kindly to this kind of treatment. They saw “the 4K boards as worthless and BASIC overpriced”. The result: the hobbyists made their own version of BASIC and shared it for free. “By the end of 1975, most copies of BASIC in use on Altair computer were pirated.” (Side note: This was back in a day when the internet was not a thing and “always online” was a twinkle in the devil’s eye.)<br>Roberts responded in the “Letter from the President” second of the MITS’ newsletter dated October 1975. Here is a relevant section:<br>Comment : MITS should give BASIC to its customers.<br>Answer : Wrong. We made a $180,000 royalty committment to Micro Soft in order to have BASIC available to our customers. MITS makes essentially no profit on BASIC. It is done as a service to our customers. The BASIC we supply has universally been accepted as nothing short of fantastic and has allowed Altair customers to be literally years ahead of where they would have been without this software. Contrary to some opinions, software developments are expensive and the people who do these developments feel that they should be paid for their efforts, I agree. It is irrevelent whether software is developed to run on a large IBM computer or the Altair, it costs money. We are selling the BASIC at 1/10 to 1/100 the price large computer companies would get for a similar package, but we are still taking gas. Anyone who would like to argue this point, should feel free to call me at MITS. Anyone who is using a stolen copy of MITS BASIC should identify himself for what he is, a thief.<br>Recently a number of parasite companies have appeared. These companies are in a tough position. They must attack us for new business but at the same time they are dependent on our product for their survival. This has resulted in a good bit of nonsensical rheotoric and advertising. We are confident that most of our customers see through the nonsense, but a few customers have attacked MITS for the failure of a competitor to deliver or for the failure of a competitor’s product to operate properly. We have more than enough of our own problems to worry about without getting involved with competitor’s problems. Therefore, I will state again that we stand behind all MITS products and systems. We will do whatever is necessary to make these systems function properly if they haven’t been abused by the owner. But if you use non-MITS products, any problems that arise are between you and your vendor.

Hobbyist Howard Fulmer read that statement. He had been planning to start a company to make accessories for the Altair. His first thought was to name the company Symbiotic Engineering. However, he changed his mind because he didn’t want people to think confuse his company with the Symbionese Liberation Army. (The SLA was a far-left militant group that had killed a school superintendent and kidnapped Patty Hearst. Most of the members has died in a shoot out with the LAPD in early 1975.) He instead picked the name Parasitic Engineering.<br>The company’s first product was a clock controller board for the Altair. They followed this up with an improved power supply for the Altair. In 1977,...