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Ed Roberts, MD died..
I grabbed this (thanks google!):
Hema Manchanda wrote:Dr. Roberts, who deserves to be recognized as the inventor of the personal computer, died Thursday at the Medical Center of Middle Georgia, his son Martin said. He was 68 and suffering from pneumonia.
He created the MITS Altair, the first inexpensive general-purpose microcomputer, a device that could be programmed to do all manner of tasks. When the Altair was introduced in the mid-1970s, personal computers which were then called microcomputers were mainly seen as complicated electronic gadgets for hobbyists. Not only this, he was a mentor to Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
Roberts built the Altair 8800 and sold it as a build-it-yourself kit, which debuted in January 1975 on the cover of Popular Electronics.
Well before personal computers moved into the mainstream of business and society, Dr. Edward left his mark on computing. He had built it as a little business; he set up a shop at Albuquerque, where he used to sell it. The Altair 8800 was sold through Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, which he co-founded in 1969. The machine was operated by switches and had no display. It took its name from the then-cutting edge Intel 8080 microprocessor.
While the company expected to only sell a few hundred of the PCs, it ended up delivering more than 5,000 within seven months after it appeared on Popular Electronics. All together the entire system used to cost $621.
He then sold everything in 1977 and moved on in life. He walked away a millionaire. After this, he studied medicine, and became a doctor in Georgia.
Gates and Allen contacted Dr Roberts after seeing the machine on the front cover of the magazine and offered to write software for it. The program was known as Altair-Basic, the foundation of Microsoft’s business.
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.
In recent months, Mr. Gates made a point of reaching out to his mentor after learning that he was ill. Mr. Gates sent Dr. Roberts a letter last December and followed up with phone calls, another son, Dr. John David Roberts, said. As Dr. Roberts lay dying last week in a hospital in Macon, suffering from pneumonia, Mr. Gates flew down to be at his bedside.
H. Edward Roberts was born in Miami on Sept. 13, 1941. His father, Henry Melvin Roberts, ran a household appliance repair service, and his mother, Edna Wilcher Roberts, was a nurse. As a young man, he wanted to be a doctor, a dream which he later fulfilled.
“More than anything, what we will always remember about Ed was how deeply compassionate he was — and that was never more true than when he decided to spend the second half of his life going to medical school and working as a country doctor making house calls,” Gates and Allen said.
& cockatoos
