Edward H. Roberts is best known for his 1974 development and marketing of the MITS Altair 8800, widely regarded as the world's first personal computer.
Edward H. Roberts was born in Miami, Florida, in 1941. He was the eldest of two children. His father worked as an appliance repairman and his mother remained at home to raise the children. From an early age he had two main interests--electronics and medicine; the latter was seen when as a teenager he got a job as a scrub technician for heart surgeons in the Miami-based Jackson Memorial Hospital. Roberts went to the University of Miami to study electronic engineering. Unfortunately his academic career was cut short when, in his junior year, Roberts' first wife, Joan, became pregnant. Roberts had to leave his studies to support his new family. Roberts chose to join the Air Force, which saw the academic potential in him. He was sent to Oklahoma State University to undertake a degree in electrical engineering--this time on full Air Force salary. Upon completing his studies Roberts was posted to the weapons laboratory in Albuquerque, where he was an officer. After several years Roberts had the desire to move his life in another direction and decided to pursue his other love, medicine. Unfortunately by this time Roberts was 27 (1968) and considered by most medical schools to be too old. Roberts remained in the Air Force and took to tinkering with electronic projects in his spare time. He proved to be very adept at this tinkering and soon produced one of the first American hand-held (pocket) calculators. Realizing the potential for such a device Roberts set up his own company--Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). MITS and its product rapidly grew beyond all of Roberts' expectations and soon he was employing 150 people. Roberts dreamed of bigger and better things--he wanted to create a personal computer.
The computer he produced (with help from Jim Bybee) in 1974 was named the Altair 8800 (after a planet in the television series Star Trek). This would not be recognizable as a modern PC. For example, there was no keyboard for input; instead there was a panel of switches. The Altair 8800 was based on the Intel 8080 chip, and it had a very small internal memory (256 bytes) and no external memory. Two young men were impressed by the computer and quickly wrote a version of Basic for its use. The elder of these, Paul Allen, was hired by Roberts. Allen's friend, Bill Gates, worked with MITS during his summer vacation from Harvard. Initially Roberts sold the computer either as a kit ($395) or as a fully assembled computer ($498). His first aim was to sell 400 units, which would have allowed him to break even. Due to a very favorable article in the December 1974 Popular Electronics 400 machines were ordered in the first afternoon. By the end of the first three months there was a backlog of over 4,000 orders. Eventually 50,000 units were sold. (It should be remembered that at the time this machine was much cheaper than any of its rivals.) The Altair 8800 pictured on the cover of the magazine was in fact a fake--the working, finished product had been lost in transit to the magazine. In 1977 Roberts sold MITS to the Pertec Computer Corporation. Roberts remained with Pertec and put forward his latest idea--a smaller version of the personal computer that could be carried around--a laptop. Pertec was not interested in this idea, believing it to be both unworkable and not wanted by computer users. Roberts resigned from the company.
By this time Roberts was a millionaire from the sale of his company. A few years later, in 1982, when Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, opened a medical school, Roberts was able to put himself through a medical degree. In 1988, aged 47, Roberts graduated as a medical doctor and set up a medical practice in Cochran. In the same year Roberts divorced from Joan, with whom he had six children. In 1991 Roberts remarried. His new wife, Donna, was a nurse from the local hospital. The fact that Roberts was now pursuing a career in medicine did not stop his interest in computers. He soon saw the advantages that would be inherent in automating some procedures in the laboratory. Since 1995 the Medical Lab Suite of programs written and developed by Roberts has been in constant use. In 2001 Roberts was still a medical doctor working at the Bleckley Memorial Hospital, Cochran, Georgia, specializing in adult internal medicine.
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