Ed Roberts, creator of the world’s first commercially successful, mass-produced personal computer, died of pneumonia on April 1, 2010, he was 68. There has long been a debate as to the “World’s first personal computer,” but Ed is now widely known and accepted as the “Father of the personal computer.” Many people are unaware that he was also Dr. Henry Edward Roberts, a small town doctor in Cochran, Georgia (about 40 miles south of Macon). Ed was an entrepreneur and a business owner, and he had three distinct careers during his life. He was a U.S Air Force airman / officer, then an electronics engineer / inventor and then ultimately a doctor. He truly lived out the American dream, and his life was an inspiring one. Although he got sidetracked early on from his dream of becoming a doctor, he worked hard and enjoyed his other endeavors. He never gave up though, and finally made that dream come true, becoming a medical doctor at 45 years old in 1986. He loved technology and gadgets, but he loved medicine and helping people even more. He was a smart sophisticated man who, in the end, chose a simple country lifestyle.

Ed was born in Miami, Florida on September 13, 1941, the older of two children (his sister born in 1947). During World War II, his father went off to the Army, so Ed and his mother lived with her parents on their farm in Wheeler County, Georgia (roughly between Macon and Savannah). He would later return to the farm during his summers to visit his grandparents. After the war, Ed returned to Miami, where his father ran a household appliance repair service, and his mother was a nurse. In high school, Ed loved biology and electronics. He built a small relay-based, analog computer to turn lights on and off, and he also built a relay-based controller for an early heart-lung machine at the University of Miami. When Ed decided he wanted to become a doctor, he chose the University of Miami where he enrolled as a biology major. A doctor at the university recognized Ed’s talent in engineering and suggested that he change his major before entering medical school, or he likely would not be able to pursue that interest later. Ed changed his major to electrical engineering and always felt that the doctor had been correct.

Ed married his first wife Joan while in college, and during his junior year, she became pregnant. To support his family, he left school and joined the Air Force in May 1962. After basic training, Ed attended the Cryptographic Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base, in San Antonio, Texas. He did so well, and because of his past electrical engineering studies, that when he completed the course, he was made an instructor at the school. Also during this time, he started a small part-time company (just him) called Reliance Engineering. One of the jobs he completed was designing and building the electronics to animate characters in a department store’s Christmas window display. In 1965, Ed was selected for the Air Force’s Airman Education & Commissioning Program to complete his college degree and become a commissioned officer. He attended Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, Oklahoma and earned an electrical engineering degree in 1968. Ed Roberts then became a commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Air Force. He was assigned to the Laser Division of the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ed was still interested in medical school and looked into it, but at 27 years old, he was told that he was now too old.

Ed met Forrest M. Mims III at the Weapons Laboratory, and both shared an interest in model rocketry. They became friends and in 1969 decided to form a company together to sell electronic kits for model rockets. Ed, Mims and two other coworkers, Bob Zaller and Stan Cagle launched “MITS.” Ed had originally wanted to use the Reliance Engineering name, but Mims wanted to use an acronym that sounded like MIT – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cagle thought up “Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems” - MITS. They soon advertised a model rocket light flasher, temperature sensor, roll rate sensor with transmitter and other kits in Model Rocketry magazine, but none of these sold more than about a hundred kits.

By 1971, one of the partners, Zaller, had already left the company, and when Mims discharged from the Air Force, he decided to pursue a career as a technology writer. Ed wanted to design and market a new kit, a calculator, but his two remaining partners wanted out. He ended up buying each of them out for $600 in cash and $350 in equipment, and then focused his company on the emerging electronic calculator market. To help fund development, he received financial investments from two other Weapons Laboratory officers, William Yates and Ed Laughlin. His first calculator kit, partly designed by Yates, was the MITS Model 816. It was a simple “four-function” that could add, subtract, multiply and divide. It was designed with a custom molded case, which gave the device a professional polish. When Popular Electronics magazine was contacted and shown the prototype, they were so impressed that it was featured on the cover of the November 1971 issue. The kit sold for $179, with an assembled unit available for $275. Unlike the model rocket kits, hundreds of orders starting coming in, then thousands - each month! Ed had predicted the market correctly, and there was a large demand for the kits. By 1973, MITS sold over $1 million in calculators a year. Ed Roberts had developed over a dozen different models, some programmable, moved the company to a 10,000 square feet building, and had over 100 employees. There were two shifts working to fulfill orders, and MITS sold every calculator that it could manufacture!

In 1970, when Ed first had the idea to create a calculator kit, he wanted to move quickly before the large companies entered the market. Just as he had predicted, when electronic calculators became more popular, other more traditional and larger office equipment and semiconductor companies started producing them. By early 1974, the retail price of a calculator in a department store was less than Ed’s cost to produce a MITS model. In November 1973, when Ed was already finding it difficult to compete, he sought out additional capital. He decided to take MITS public with a stock offering of 500,000 shares at $1 each. Because of the down market and economy, mostly caused by the oil crisis, he was only able to sell about half of the shares. The cash flow did allow MITS to pay off most of their existing debt, but it left little for new product development. The company continued to lose money, and by mid-1974 was in over $300,000 of debt. Ed had known that he had to come up with a unique product to save the company, so he was already working on a lifelong ambition, building a digital computer. Because of his diverse calculator design expertise, Ed felt that the Intel 8008 (inside Jonathan Titus's Mark-8, featured in the July 1974 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine) was not powerful enough, and the Motorola 6800 was not yet available, so he chose to design a computer based on Intel's new 8080 microprocessor. It was also important that the new computer potentially be able to run the BASIC programming language.

At the time, there was a project rivalry between Radio-Electronics and Popular Electronics, so Arthur Salsberg, Editorial Director of PE, had told Leslie Solomon, Technical Editor, to be on the lookout for a more advanced computer kit than the Mark-8. Solomon was aware of Ed's project, so he called to see if MITS could deliver a computer project in time for the January 1975 issue. Ed committed to having the computer kit ready on time. He knew this would be his best and last chance to keep MITS alive. He approached his bank for a loan of $65,000 to finance the final design and initial production, and he convinced them that his company could sell 800 of the computers. Ed has stated in interviews that he “was accused of being a wild-eyed, crazy optimist!” He secretly hoped that he could sell at least 200.

MITS was down to only 20 employees, but Ed still had a great asset in Bill Yates. They got right to work preparing a prototype computer system. Ed designed the interface logic for the: 8080 microprocessor, RAM memory, clock, front panel switches and LEDs. Yates spent a lot of time planning the circuit boards and bus terminations, plus he laid out the foil patterns for the circuit boards. Ed also designed something into his computer which proved to be a pivotal addition to the emerging microcomputer industry; he invented an open bus so peripheral cards could be added. His “Altair” computer contained the “Altair Bus,” the first industry standard bus for the microcomputer industry. Ed would become annoyed later, as his competitors renamed his creation the “S-100 Bus.”

Though Ed had met with a number of hardships during its development, the “Altair 8800” made the deadline for kit publication in PE. One famous related story is how the first prototype was forever lost in October 1974 due to the employee strike and bankruptcy of REA - the Railway Express Agency. As planned, the Altair appeared at newsstands a week before Christmas 1974 on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. Within a few days, phone calls and orders began pouring in. By February MITS had received 1,000 Altair orders. By August, there had been over 5,000. The company went on to produce a computer based on the Motorola 6800 microprocessor, the Altair 680; then two updates to the 8800 in 1976, the Altair 8800a and 8800b. MITS also produced memory cards, I/O controllers, disk controllers, disk drives and more. Within two years, MITS had created an entire microcomputer ecosystem, pioneering the first affordable computer, computer retailing, computer company newsletter, the first personal computer user group, and the first company-sponsored personal computer conference. For a while, MITS was the largest producer of computers in the world. Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft at MITS, writing their first software product for the Altair, Altair BASIC.

By late 1976, Ed was tired of his growing management responsibilities, plus he regretted not spending enough time with his children, so he looked for a larger partner. Because of the close relationship between MITS and Pertec (who manufactured disk drives), he looked to them. On December 3, 1976, Pertec signed a letter of intent to acquire MITS for $6 million in stock. The transaction was completed in May 1977. By late 1977, dissatisfied with the direction that Pertec was taking the company, Ed resigned. He took his $3 million share of the deal and moved his family to a large farm in Wheeler County, GA, where he had spent those memorable childhood summers. He tried farming, but when Mercer University in Macon opened a new medical school in 1982, Ed applied and was accepted. He graduated with the first class in 1986. In 1988, he completed his residency in internal medicine, and at 47 years old, established a practice in nearby Cochran.

Regarding the personal computer, Ed was a little something like Henry Ford, who didn't invent the automobile, but rather defined its industry dramatically. The credit for fathering today's personal computer and its industry rightfully belongs to one person, Ed Roberts. To the world, he will mostly be remembered as the creator of the Altair, but read some of the entries from his patients, family and friends at his memorial page (see below), and you’ll better understand the true person of Dr. Henry Edward Roberts. He was very proud of his technical and entrepreneurial accomplishments, but he was fulfilled the most with the personal and individual victories of the many that he helped as a medical doctor.

I was a small computer history newsletter publisher in 1995 and Ed graciously granted me an interview with him at his medical office in Cochran. After fifteen years, I have converted that audio interview to a digital format. The audio (mp3) can be found here. I think that the audio recording of our interview will become a historic and important media document. Ed has been written about numerous times throughout the years, and he's even been portrayed in at least one movie, "Pirates of Silicon Valley." In popular culture, his persona is that of a very stern and somewhat one-sided guy, but my wife and I found Ed to be a kind gentleman. He was down-to-earth and personable. We both enjoyed our time with him. I’m sure this is of no surprise to his family and friends. I was / am so honored to have had the chance to meet Ed personally and to have interviewed him.

In a joint statement after Ed’s death, Bill Gates and Paul Allen said, “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. He will be missed by many and we were lucky to have known him.”

Memorial Site: http://www.legacy.com/guestbook/guestbook.aspx?n=henry-roberts&pid=141367397

1995 audio interview with Ed Roberts: Link

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_%28computer_engineer%29

I, Cringely (with audio of article): http://www.cringely.com/2010/04/terminal-man/

David Bunnell: http://www.my-wellness-coach.com/2010/04/remembering-ed-roberts-the-father-of-the-personal-computer-industry-.html

Make magazine with excellent audio interview with Forrest Mims: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/04/remembering_ed_roberts_the_father_o.html

CBS News: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/01/tech/main6354798.shtml

Bill Gates & Paul Allen’s joint statement: http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Thinking/article.aspx?ID=126

The Altair story; early days at MITS, by Forrest Mims: http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n11/17_The_Altair_story_early_d.php