“Ed Roberts Remembered as PC Pioneer” plus 1 more

Posted: 02 Apr 2010 06:00 PM PDT

Dr. Henry Edward Roberts, who designed the Altair 8800 personal computer in 1974, died Friday at the age of 68. The computer kit that "Ed" Roberts developed and offered to hobbyists at a price of $397 is credited by many industry observers as the key event that launched the personal-computer revolution.

The American engineer, medical doctor, and founder of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) first gained national attention in 1971 when he unveiled an electronic calculator kit that made the cover of Popular Electronics.

"Just out of the military, Ed had this idea about offering an electronic calculator kit," said Les Solomon, a former editor at Popular Electronics. "And I had to listen, since he stands over six feet and weighs 235 pounds or so."

The Star Trek Factor

But it was the development of the Altair 8800 personal computer that really captured the attention of world in January 1975, when Roberts' next product took its inaugural bows on the cover of Popular Electronics under the name Altair at the suggestion of Solomon's daughter, who was watching Star Trek at the time.

"Why don't you call it Altair? That's where the Enterprise is going in this episode," Lauren Solomon suggested, and the rest is history.

"One of our competitors, Radio-Electronics, was preparing a story on a "computer" using an Intel 8008 microprocessor chip," Solomon said in an online interview posted at atariarchives.org. "Ed looked into it, obtained an even newer Intel chip called the 8080, and with a couple of engineering friends set about creating his own computer."

Roberts' design efforts were an outgrowth of his study of electrical engineering at the University of Miami and later at Oklahoma State University. After entering the U.S. Air Force in 1962, he enrolled in the Cryptographic Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, where he subsequently served as an instructor.

The George Eastman of PCs

Although the 1975 Popular Electronics article generated an orders avalanche for Roberts' Altair kit, the product wasn't without defects. According to MITS cofounder Forrest Mims, Roberts admitted that "the infamous 4K memory board was a major mistake."

Moreover, Roberts' "momentous decision" to include provisions for an open bus so additional memory and peripheral cards could be added would later prove to be short-sighted.

"Ed designed a hefty eight-ampere power supply for the machine, having no idea that even this much power would later prove inadequate," Mims observed in a 1984 article published by Creative Computing. "How was Ed to know an industry would spring up almost overnight with the sole purpose of supplying peripheral boards for his Altair?"

Still, Mims noted that what Roberts did for personal computing was comparable to what George Eastman did for photography. "The first computer stores anywhere were set up to sell Altairs" and "the open Altair bus paved the way for a microcomputer revolution," he observed.

Moreover, Microsoft cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen were able to get their software business off the ground thanks to Roberts' decision to select them as the developers of Altair BASIC. Following the successful arbitration of its licensing agreement with MITS, Microsoft began shipping what would eventually be known as Microsoft Basic to other companies.

Altair-maker MITS was acquired by Pertec for $6 million in stock in 1977, with Roberts' share of the deal valued at a cool $2 million. In 1982, Roberts entered medical school -- his initial choice for a vocation -- and received a medical degree from Georgia's Mercer University in 1986, after which he established a practice in the small town of Cochran, Ga.

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PC Pioneer Ed Roberts Dies at 68

Posted: 02 Apr 2010 08:50 AM PDT

Ed Roberts died today in Georgia at the age of 68. The development of the personal computer was too collaborative for any one person to deserve the honor of being the father of the indusEd Robertstry...but as I think about it, I can't think of anyone with a better claim on the title than Roberts. He may not have invented the PC, but he surely invented the PC industry.

Roberts cofounded MITS in Albuquerque in 1969 and served as its president. The company made rocket kits at first, and then calculators, and was struggling when Roberts made the decision to launch the Altair 8800, the first PC to gain any traction. When it appeared on the front cover of Popular Electronics magazine's January 1975 issue, a couple of young geeks got so excited by the issue they picked up at Harvard Square's Out of Town News that they wrote a version of the BASIC programming language for it even though they didn't have an Altair. They relocated to Albuquerque and ended up founding a company to write software for the system. The geeks were Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and they called their company Micro-Soft.

The Altair also inspired the founding of Silicon Valley's legendary Homebrew Computer Club, whose membership included numerous important PC-industry figures -- including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who started their own computer company to compete with MITS in 1976.

MITS' dominance of the PC business was brief (by 1977, when the Apple II, Radio Shack TRS-80, and Commodore PET came out, the Altair already felt like a machine from an earlier era). But in many ways the business model that sprung up around MITS' computers -- including clones, upgrades, peripherals, books and magazines, computer stores, Intel processors, and Microsoft software -- lives on to this day.

In 1977, Roberts sold MITS and returned to his boyhood home state of Georgia, where he eventually fulfilled a longtime dream by earning a medical degree and becoming a country doctor.

I asked David Bunnell, who was VP of marketing at MITS and went on to found PC Magazine, PC World, and Macworld, among other businesses, to remember his friend and colleague:

In my mind, Ed Roberts will always be the Father of the Personal Computer Industry. Whether the Altair was the first PC or not isn't that material, what really matters is Ed launched the most dynamic, fastest growing industry the world has ever seen. There would be no Apple, no Google, no Facebook without his initial contribution. And for me, personally, he taught me all about the excitement and rewards of being an entrepreneur.

And here's a statement from Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

MITS Altair