I’m posting this one day late, because I didn’t want it to get lost in all the April 1 nonsense. We’ve been in the computer age for a while now, and while that gives us the privilege of dealing with some truly great products and innovations, it sadly also means that we are starting to lose the pioneers that defined this industry. Yesterday, Ed Roberts shuffled out of life due to pneumonia. Dr. Henry Edward Roberts developed the Altair 8800, considered to be the first personal computer.
You don’t hear his name often any more these days, but that’s most likely because he left the computing industry so early. Ed Roberts founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), and at that company, he developed the Altair 8800, the Intel 8080-based personal computer – the first personal computer – in 1974, which went on sale early 1975.
You could buy it as a kit, or assembled, and as you can expect, it didn’t look anything like the personal computers of today. There was no display; instead, it employed a series of LEDs (later, additional output methods would become available). Data input was handled by switches, and you all could do was make the LEDs blink.
“The user toggled the switches to positions corresponding to an 8080 microprocessor instruction or opcode in binary, then used an ‘enter’ switch to load the code into the machine’s memory, and then repeated this step until all the opcodes of a presumably complete and correct program were in place,” Wikipedia tells us.
The Altair is also the computer upon which the Microsoft empire is built. After seeing the Altair in a copy of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, Paul Allen and Bill Gates contacted Roberts, telling him they could provide BASIC for the Altair. In reality, Allan and Gates didn’t have anything, so they quickly went to work writing a BASIC on a 8080 simulator for the PDP-10. The first actual version of Altair BASIC crashed, but the second version ran, with the first program being 10 print 2+2.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates issued a joint statement yesterday. “Ed was truly a pioneer in the personal computer revolution, and didn’t always get the recognition he deserved,” the statement reads, “He was an intense man with a great sense of humor, and he always cared deeply about the people who worked for him, including us. Ed was willing to take a chance on us – two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace – and we have always been grateful to him.”
Roberts sold MITS in 1977, after which he went to work on a farm. In 1986, he would complete medical school, becoming a country doctor making house calls. He kept up with technology, and his son David Roberts said that he became interested in nanotechnology-enhanced machines. On his deathbed, Ed Roberts even inquired about Apple’s iPad; he wanted to see one. David Roberts confirmed Bill Gates rushed to Georgia last Friday “to be with his mentor”.
Paul Allen said in an email to CNET that “Ed was the first entrepreneur Bill and I spent time around, and we learned a lot about business from him.” Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is saddened by Roberts’ death and stated that “he took a critically important step that led to everything we have today”.
We lost one of the great yesterday, even though you may have never heard of him. As I’m typing this, I realise how every keystroke I make, every pixel I alter, every bit I flip on my personal computer, can be traced back to him. A very strange realisation, that.
The OSAlert team would like to express our condolences to Roberts’ family and friends. And, of course, we would like to thank him for the invaluable contributions he made to the world of technology.
I still have all the advertising, price sheets, and manuals.
your work in the industry and it’s impact in the entire ecosystem of computing will never be forgotten. Thank you for helping us get to where we are today.
The story of his life did make a deep impression on me. Technology, then back to the farm, medical school… This man did everything.
Edited 2010-04-02 17:06 UTC
Yes. I like that he “left the business” and got into farming, then became a country doctor. Something about that is soothing to my soul. He was obviously brilliant and capable of doing many different things… and he also apparently enjoyed helping people and a simpler life style.
Neat stuff. Thanks for the post, Thom! (I had wondered why this wasn’t posted yesterday).
Tuishimi, very well said. I find it soothing also.
Indeed, I think not being constrained by money and profit as the only metrics which guided his personal life speak volumes in regards to his quality as a human being.
He seems to have lived a truly full life, RIP.
Same thing here.
I must confess I did not know about this pioneer or about the computer he created. But I’ve taught computer science, automata theory, grammars, memory paging, context switching, resource allocation, all the things related to compilers and operating systems. And at that time, when telling students about “what happened before”, I was just appalled when thinking about how difficult (and I stress the adjective) it must have been, back in those days I couldn’t know, long before Java and other fancy modern technologies came to existence…
I don’t even *want* to imagine what a bad evening could look like then.
We didn’t get to where we are now by magic like Athena getting all grown-up and armed out of Zeus’ head. There is some history and credit is due to those who made that history. It makes me incredibly mad (sad too) when I read that someone from the Free Software Foundation (or another FLOSS organization) disparaged Donald Knuth… come on, some icons are just untouchable… where would technology be without volume 3 of TAOCP, not to mention the other volumes? without TeX and Metafont? Same goes with “limitless ego” Linus Torvalds doing the same with CVS and SVN…
To me, that’s close to blasphemy, no matter who you are, no matter how noble what you stand for is or how important your contribution was.
Many thanks to Ed Roberts.
Thanks Thom for this article, it brought me tears of gratitude and many thoughts about the pioneers (Babbage, Turing, Hamming, Huffman, Shannon, Ritchie & Kernighan come to my mind) we owe so much to.
I can only hope that a future history of the beginnings of the information age can remember such humble beginnings.
Yes Google, Microsoft and Apple are fascinating. But lets not forget the true beginners of this industry Ed Roberts, Felsenstein, Greenblatt, Gosper and many, many, many more…
Today there is (to the best of my knowledge) no comprehensive history or scholarship about this crucial part of the twentieth century other than transitive comments and blogs. It is painful to appreciate how much is being lost even as I write this.
I should modify that they are some of my personal heros and I’m certainly not trying to rank above Babbage, Lovelace, Hopper et al et al et al.
If you allow me to, I second each and every bit of that.
On another side, I am shocked at the low number of comments to this article, especially in contrast to what the iPhone articles attract.
I’m not. Being of the younger generation and not a huge history buff of any kind, his name and the details of the Altair were new to me. In general, and not just in computing, many names end up being forgotten undeservedly by most people. It’s very unfortunate, but I guess that’s just how it is.
I’m disappointed but not shocked.
Most people forget about Woz’s contribution towards Job’s success let alone many of the other greats of IT that hadn’t achieved celebrity status in the media.
Don’t be – obviously this is more news worthy than the latest ithing. However, it may not be lack of respect – just lack of anything to say.
Lets hope the spirit of innovation of the early days of computing of which Ed Roberts was a notable part can be emulated into the future. In some ways I feel that the opensource community is an attempt to do this.
He is the one who bought Basic version 1.0 from Bill Gates.
His machine is the first one in the industry to run MS-Basic.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw an opportunity and wrote Altair BASIC, a true programming language, and the first commercial Microsoft computer product.
http://oldcomputers.net/altair.html
Jay Miner died 16 years ago, so we’re hardly “starting” to lose those pionniers. And I don’t think he’s the only one, neither that he was the first.
My condolences.
These are really sad news.
May he rest in peace.
Ciao Ed!
Back in 99 or 00 (I don’t know which) I did a research paper on the beginning of the PC industry in high school. I contacted the greats of the time — including Ed Roberts.
Aside from Woz, Roberts was the only one to respond to my request for correspondence.
Ed came across to me as a humble man who had a down-to-earth sensibility that you don’t seem to find these days. He described MITS as a failure, in that he was unable to achieve his original business goals — making a living selling electronic kits for calculators and personal aerospace (model rocketry) use. But in the end, he stumbled upon the idea for a kit computer, put it together, and had -no-idea- what it would spur on.
The guy was a gentle hearted, accidental ‘visionary’, and his ‘accident’ afforded him the ability to pursue another career he’d always been interested in.
…I knew about the Altair (read about them at the time, but in country South Australia it was hard to get the bits and pieces back then), but couldn’t tell you who made it (I’ve seen Pirates of Silicon Valley a few times now too)…
I guess I saw him as one of the important stepping stones on the way to where we are now, so didn’t pay him as much respect as maybe I should have.
I love the idea of working on a farm too, I totally get where he was on that one!!!
I still think it’s weird that people living in the so-called developed countries still die of pneumonia these days.
I can understand when you’re older, your body is getting weaker and you’re attracting more medical problems.
But he was 68 and that’s way way too young.