Ed Roberts, the maker of the world’s first personal computer, died yesterday at the age of 68.
Roberts created the Altair 8800, the first computer normal people could a) afford and b) use in their homes, without it taking up an entire room. Altair 8800 was also the platform Paul Allen and Bill Gates used to make their first programs and launch Microsoft.
In the wake of nearly-obsessive anticipation of the iPad and its revolutionary potential, it’s worth remembering how people like Roberts got this whole personal computer thing started.
Roberts founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System (MITS) in 1970 to sell model rocket kits. By 1971, MITS moved beyond model rockets and started making electronic calculator kits. Roberts' next project was making a low-cost computer kit that a broad array of customers could afford and use. MITS finished building the Altair 8800 in late 1974.
By today’s standards, Altair wasn’t sexy. The $439 build-it-yourself computer had no display and was operated by switches. Nonetheless, it was a radical departure from massive mainframe computers, mostly owned by universities, and proved to be a commercial hit. By August 1975, MITS shipped more than 5,000 Altairs.
Bill Gates, a Harvard sophomore at the time, and Paul Allen, working in Boston, saw the Altair 8800 in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. The duo immediately decided to be the first to write programs for the machine, in BASIC programming language.
The only problem? They did not have access to an actual Altair 8800. Instead, they created a BASIC emulator that worked on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Harvard.
According to Stephen Mantes’ 1994 book on Gates, the team was soon calling Roberts and claiming they have BASIC programs ready to roll on an Altair computer. They went to MITS’ headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico to present their products.
This was the first time they saw the Altair. To their utmost surprise, the BASIC code that they developed in a simulator worked almost perfectly in its first run on an actual Altair. A month later, Microsoft was founded.
Roberts didn’t stick around for the computer revolution that followed. He sold MITS, moved to Georgia in late 1977, enrolled in a medical school, and in 1988 started his own medical practice in Cochran, Georgia.
Robert’ Altair was the first mass-appeal, low-cost, feature-stingy personal computer. It was smaller and less powerful than most computers available at the time, but was far better suited to the needs of ordinary users. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
(Photos: Wikipedia)
