FATHER OF PERSONAL COMPUTER IS NO MORE IN BETWEEN US...


The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured on its cover a box with switches and blinking lights called the Altair 8800, considered by many to be the first personal computer.

Ed Roberts, who died Thursday at age 68, created the Altair, the computer that brought Microsoft Corp. founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen into desktop computing. His machine inspired a legion of hobbyists who became the foundation of a vibrant new industry.

An Air Force trained engineer who had designed electronics for Christmas window displays, Mr. Roberts and a colleague in 1969 founded MITS Inc., in Albuquerque, N.M. The company's name was an acronym for Micro Telemetry Instrumentation Systems; it initially built equipment for model-rocketry hobbyists.

MITS soon began building kit-based electronic calculators, which were then considered new-fangled, high-tech and expensive. But by 1973, MITS was losing money because of competition from Texas Instruments and other manufacturers. With several years of experience producing electronics kits for hobbyists, Mr. Roberts decided to stake his small company on a programmable computer, something that he had long envisioned.

Despite the fact that few knew just what to do with a computer that lacked a keyboard, display or storage, MITS was overwhelmed with orders after the Altair appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine. Two attentive readers of that issue were Messrs. Gates and Allen, who had been working on a version of the programming language Basic.

Mr. Allen ended up flying to Albuquerque with a preliminary version of the program, which later shipped with each Altair. Mr. Gates dropped out of Harvard, Mr. Allen quit his job and the two young programmers moved to Albuquerque. There they founded Microsoft to provide software for the Altair.

The Altair garnered 5,000 orders in its first year, with the base model selling for $397.

New companies soon opened to provide circuit boards and other peripherals that made the Altair more useful. The Altair helped inspire some of the first computer magazines and conventions, and also the first clones—copies built on the same design principles around the same Intel Corp. chip.

Mr. Roberts in 1977 sold MITS to Pertec Computer Corp. of Los Angeles, a manufacturer of disk drives. He took up farming and later attended medical school.

In the late 1980s, Mr. Roberts moved to rural Cochran, Ga., where the town's only doctor had recently died. He set up a clinic with a modern laboratory, built a local network to link the office's computers and wrote record-keeping software.

But now the father is no more in between us. A heart breaking news for all the upcoming and existing engineers.


With Regards...!