Ed Roberts (MITS Altair 8800) passed away - UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration Discussion Forum

Dean Huster · 25th Jun 2010, 2:20 am

I saw that the Altair 8800 thread was closed and would have posted this there, but .....

Ed Roberts, formerly of Microwave Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in Albuquerque, New Mexico USA passed away recently. He was the main developer of the MITS Altair 8800 personal computer. Not long after, he got together with a kid who left Harvard University to work with Roberts, writing the BASIC code for the interpreter. The kid called his company "Micro-Soft", later named Microsoft .... Bill Gates, of course. Paul Allen, one of the Microsoft originals, wrote the obit for Time magazine. Forrest Mims (many of you may know the name from magazine articles and Radio Shack books) used to work with Roberts as well.

Roberts left MITS (I assume he sold all or a portion of the company) several years after the Altair was going strong and moved to the east coast of the U.S., went to medical school and became a medical doctor.

With regard to the closed thread on the Altair 8800, I did buy one of those within the first month after the January 1974 issue of Popular Electronics arrived. That was the issue that heralded the development of the Altair. The original machine in kit form sold for just under $400US and came with absolutely no I/O other than the ability to load the program with front-panel switches a la DEC PDP-8. It also came with 256 bytes of static RAM. That was not a typo .... 256 BYTES, not gigabytes, megabytes or kilobytes. Remember, this was 1974 and mainframe and mini computers were still using magnetic core memory. The 8080A could only address 64KB maximum anyway! When the Altair was introduced at that low price, Intel was currently selling the 8080A microprocessor for about $100 more, so I assume that Ed Roberts had a deal going with Intel, and well he should have. The Altair was probably as much the launching pad for Intel's popular microprocessor as it was for microcomputers.

Dean

25th Jun 2010, 2:20 am	#1
Dean Huster Retired Dormant Member Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Harviell, Missouri, USA. Posts: 31	Ed Roberts (MITS Altair 8800) passed away I saw that the Altair 8800 thread was closed and would have posted this there, but ..... Ed Roberts, formerly of Microwave Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in Albuquerque, New Mexico USA passed away recently. He was the main developer of the MITS Altair 8800 personal computer. Not long after, he got together with a kid who left Harvard University to work with Roberts, writing the BASIC code for the interpreter. The kid called his company "Micro-Soft", later named Microsoft .... Bill Gates, of course. Paul Allen, one of the Microsoft originals, wrote the obit for Time magazine. Forrest Mims (many of you may know the name from magazine articles and Radio Shack books) used to work with Roberts as well. Roberts left MITS (I assume he sold all or a portion of the company) several years after the Altair was going strong and moved to the east coast of the U.S., went to medical school and became a medical doctor. With regard to the closed thread on the Altair 8800, I did buy one of those within the first month after the January 1974 issue of Popular Electronics arrived. That was the issue that heralded the development of the Altair. The original machine in kit form sold for just under $400US and came with absolutely no I/O other than the ability to load the program with front-panel switches a la DEC PDP-8. It also came with 256 bytes of static RAM. That was not a typo .... 256 BYTES, not gigabytes, megabytes or kilobytes. Remember, this was 1974 and mainframe and mini computers were still using magnetic core memory. The 8080A could only address 64KB maximum anyway! When the Altair was introduced at that low price, Intel was currently selling the 8080A microprocessor for about $100 more, so I assume that Ed Roberts had a deal going with Intel, and well he should have. The Altair was probably as much the launching pad for Intel's popular microprocessor as it was for microcomputers. Dean