In 1974, Dr. Ed Roberts’ company, MITS, released a personal computer for $395 called the Altair 8800, Engadget reports. It was featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in the January 1975 issue (which cost 75 cents on the newsstand!) and from there, rocketed to success as a household machine.
In response to a letter from two young Computer Science students claiming that they had written a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 microprocessor, Dr. Roberts later contracted a young Bill Gates and Paul Allen to write Altair BASIC, giving the young company Micro-soft a foothold into the future of technology. Gates and Allen released this statement yesterday in response to the news of Dr. Roberts’ passing:
“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… The day our first untested software worked on his Altair was the start of a lot of great things. We will always have many fond memories of working with Ed in Albuquerque, in the MITS office right on Route 66 — where so many exciting things happened that none of us could have imagined back then.”
To learn more about Roberts’ work and about the rise of the personal computer, check out the documentary “Triumph of the Nerds,” available for free at Drexel Library. Transcripts provided by PBS can be found here.
Dr. Henry Edward “Ed” Roberts, father of personal computing, passed away yesterday from pneumonia, at age 68.
