Subscribers to Popular Electronics were a sophisticated group. The magazine’s editor, Arthur Salsberg, felt compelled to point out as much in the editorial section of the December 1974 issue. The magazine had received letters complaining that a recent article, titled “How to Set Up a Home TV Service Shop,” would inspire a horde of amateur TV technicians to go out and undercut professional repairmen, doing great damage to everyone’s TVs in the process. Salsberg thought this concern was based on a misunderstanding about who read Popular Electronics. He explained that, according to the magazine’s own surveys, 52% of Popular Electronics subscribers were electronics professionals of some kind and 150,000 of them had repaired a TV in the last 60 days. Moreover, the average Popular Electronics subscriber had spent $470 on electronics equipment ($3578 in 2018) and possessed such necessities as VOMs, VTVMs, tube testers, transistor testers, r-f signal generators, and scopes. “Popular Electronics readers are not largely neophytes,” Salsberg concluded.

The Altair 8800 was a build-it-yourself home computer kit released in 1975. The Altair was basically the first personal computer, though it predated the advent of that term by several years. It is Adam (or Eve) to every Dell, HP, or Macbook out there.