Welcome to the forum. I do hope you'll tell us more about your micro-launchers project, when you have time. It sounds fascinating and I'd love to read more.
I don't remember the Altair computer, though the first computer I ever used was a North Star Horizon, which I think must have appeared just 3 or 4 years after the Altair. Likening your launcher project to the Altair has an interesting irony to it. According to Wikipedia, the Altair was created by a small company called MITS, and their company history was as follows:
Quote:
While serving at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, Ed Roberts and Forrest M. Mims III decided to use their electronics background to produce small kits for model rocket hobbyists. In 1969, Roberts and Mims, along with Stan Cagle and Robert Zaller, founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in Roberts' garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and started selling radio transmitters and instruments for model rockets.
So Altair's makers were into rocketry from the beginning! (I've no doubt you knew that already, but its an interesting discovery for me!)