Death of a Giant: Ed Roberts

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Albert Einstein once said of himself, "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants." Ed Roberts was one of those giants to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude for our computing technology. You probably have never heard of this great man or his work but I'm about to change all that. Ed Roberts is someone you want to know. He is the "Father of the Personal Computer."

He created the Altair computer, which was a kit-ified computer project. Before I was old enough to afford the $400 for one of his kits, Ed Roberts was making history.

It didn't take long for word to reach from Albuquerque to a couple of young college dropouts in Seattle, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who had created some software that they wanted to try out on this computer. After a couple of tries, it worked and the first personal computer software product, Altair BASIC, was born. The rest is history. Ed Roberts faded into oblivion for most of us.

He left Albuquerque and went back to his native Georgia and became a medical doctor, his lifelong dream. He lived in Georgia until his death on April 1, 2010.

Many who knew Roberts, including Bill Gates, flew to Georgia to pay their final respects to him. They, and we, owe him everything.

I'm sure at the time, he didn't realize the full significance of what he was doing but in retrospect during his life as a doctor, he probably looked back with the humble knowledge that he had helped change the world.

Dani AI

Generated

Good summary from — a few precise, verifiable details and context that commonly get left out.

Ed Roberts’ Altair 8800 was a kit from his MITS shop in Albuquerque that used the Intel 8080 CPU and was shown on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics. It had no keyboard or display — users toggled front‑panel switches and read LEDs — and the magazine exposure produced a huge surge of orders; within months MITS was shipping thousands of units and an aftermarket of memory and I/O boards followed. See the Popular Electronics cover and contemporary scans for the original coverage. (computerhistory.org)

One technical legacy worth highlighting: the Altair’s 100‑pin backplane quickly became the de facto “Altair” or S‑100 bus. That open, plug‑in card architecture is what let dozens of small vendors produce add‑on boards, clones and eventually a formal IEEE‑696 standard — a major reason the hobbyist market coalesced into an industry. For a focused history of the S‑100 evolution and why it mattered, see the S‑100 origin notes. (retrotechnology.com)

A couple of practical notes about the software side and Roberts’ later life that add context to what you wrote: Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed Altair BASIC using an 8080 emulator on a PDP‑10 before they owned an Altair, MITS bundled BASIC with the machine, and legal/licensing skirmishes followed as the market grew. Roberts sold MITS to Pertec in 1977, left the industry, pursued medicine (Mercer University), practiced as a rural physician in Georgia, and passed away in April 2010; Microsoft’s co‑founders published a joint remembrance at the time. (blogs.microsoft.com)

For anyone reading this thread later and wanting primary artifacts or a compact, authoritative overview, the Computer History Museum’s Popular Electronics item, the contemporary scans at DigiBarn, the S‑100 history notes, and the Microsoft remembrance are solid starting points. (computerhistory.org)

References (primary sources cited above):
Computer History Museum — Popular Electronics cover
DigiBarn — Popular Electronics Jan 1975 scan
RetroTechnology — Origins of the S-100 bus
Microsoft blog — Remembering Ed Roberts (joint Gates/Allen statement)
The Independent — obituary / overview

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