Posted on 04/01/2010 8:57:51 PM PDT by John S Mosby
Dr. Henry Edward Roberts, a developer of an early personal computer that inspired Bill Gates to found Microsoft, died Thursday in Georgia. He was 68.
Roberts, whose build-it-yourself kit concentrated thousands of dollars worth of computer capability in an affordable package, inspired Bill Gates and his childhood friend Paul Allen to come up with Microsoft in 1975 after they saw an article about the MITS Altair 8800 in Popular Electronics.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Additional info on Dr. Roberts. He eventually went to medical school, private practice as an internist and worked a vegetable farm in rural GA. He made house calls.
Sorry, meant to post the link to wikipedia on him.
Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_%28computers%29
I had one of these.
Good post.
The MITS Altair was not the first commercial personal computer although it was the first with some commercial success. Mers Kutt, a Canadian, developed the MCM-70 based on the Intel 8008. The MCM-70 was unveiled in September 1973 although I am not if the machine was sold. Here is a brief article with details about Mers Kutt and his invention.
http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/canadian-inventor-is-the-father-of-microcomputing/116075
I rented one of his condos in Ft. Lauderdale several years ago. It was a mediocre experience because he did not provide the key on the first night (needed to rent another place for one night) and the building was undergoing extensive renovations (never disclosed).
Couldn't afford an Altair, didn't know what I'd do with a computer that just turned on lights. Went back to time shared mainframes, DEC was the big company then.
Give Gates some credit: he knew that it would need a real OS, and real software.
Course he stole that from Galactic Research, but that's a different story...
“It was a mediocre experience because he did not provide the key on the first night (needed to rent another place for one night) and the building was undergoing extensive renovations (never disclosed).”
Are you sure it wasn’t Bill Gates?
I used mine to turn on a sequence of lights with assembly code language. I still remember how much it sucked to program by flipping switches up and down for 10 minutes to load the program. One wrong flip from being distracted and you had to start over. It controlled lights for an early computerized perimetery device.
WIthout interface cards, that’s all the early PDP-8’s and PDP-11’s did too. They had front panels with bat-handle switches and LED lights.
The big diff was that the Altair had a much lower price point, and a bus that was simple enough that hobby users could slap a card together. It really wasn’t much more than the signal/data lines on the 8080 brought out to lines on the bus.
What else the S-100 brought about was a clone industry once cards started shipping. When I was a kid, there were a dozen S-100 based computers out there in the “professional microcomputer” market, IMO because Ed Roberts created the S-100 and a couple of other people standardized it.
I worked on IMSAI machines at engineering school. Still have fond memories of them - even tho I thought CP/M was a complete rip-off of RT-11.
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
"We don't see Windows as a long-term graphical interface for the masses." Quote from a Lotus Development official.
"Inconceivable!" Vizzini
no, it would have involved bugs.
That is SO wrong. I ashamed that I laughed so hard.
whoa! i had forgotten all about DEC...
He started a reasonably successful company building calculators - I have a copy of his book, which is now a collector’s item. Although eventually the S-100 bus became fairly robust, the original design of the Altair 8800 was not the best, even by the standards of that time. IMSAI and Processor Technology were important in making S-100 machines trustworthy computers and not just toys.
“I worked on IMSAI machines at engineering school. Still have fond memories of them - even tho I thought CP/M was a complete rip-off of RT-11.”
Actually, much earlier than that - CP/M looks a lot and is structured a lot like OS/8, the operating system of the PDP-8 computer, which had been around since 1965 or so. Considering that minicomputers of that era were so resource-poor in terms of memory and speed, this was a good place for microcomputers, also limited in both of those areas to start.
A little more info. Apparently Bill Gates flew into Macon, where Roberts was in hospital w/ pneumonia, and visited him. He and Paul Allen made a statement.
Roberts life story was one of hard work, patriotism, military service, ingenuity, curiosity. He wanted to become an MD, had to quit school to support a new family, was delayed, and eventually got an MD. He wanted to farm in the county where he grew up with his grandparents, and he did that in Wheeler County, GA (named after Confederate cavalry officer, General Joe Wheeler- who also served in the Rough Riders in Cuba) where they grow delicious Vidalia onions. Just a great “by your bootstraps” story.
Another part of this, is that while Gates and Allen wrote BASIC code they were under contract to do that for Roberts. They proceeded to sell this code outside of Roberts company and, of course people borrowed the code for their own machines. There was a lawsuit over this ownership. Maybe Gates paid Roberts off later- gave him microsoft stock or something- but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth yet again about Gates and Allen- nothing new. Some of you may comment further on this, more in the know. But it is similar to other inventors who never really reaped the benefit of their hard work— it was more important to them to invent, do the work and move to new things. This fellow should have a memorial of him.
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