Ed Roberts, PC Pioneer (1941--2010)
The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal (April 3-4, 2010) ran an obituary of Ed Roberts, the designer of the Altair computer that helped advance the realm of hobby and home computers in the mid 1970's. Other hobby or experimenter computers already existed in January 1975 when Roberts' computer, the MITS Altair 8800 appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine. But the Altair become popular because it provided a complete kit of parts and kits for plug-in add-on boards that could expand memory. The open S-100 bus, which eventually became the IEEE 696 spec, encouraged entrepreneurs and experimenters to design add-ons that seem primitive today. Those add-on boards included an interface for an audio cassette-tape recorder that stored data and code, serial interfaces for Teletypewriters, printers, and alphanumeric terminals, 8-inch floppy-disk interfaces, and prototyping boards for wire-wrapped projects.
Roberts' company, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, got its start building small radio transmitters for model-rocket enthusiasts who wanted an inexpensive "downlink" that could transmit information such as rotation rate, altitude, and temperature. As best I can recall, the transmitter kits operated in the 27-MHz Citizens' Band, so operators did not need a license. The telemetry kits did not "take off," so Roberts and his colleagues developed calculator kits soon after calculator ICs came on the market from several semiconductor companies. The calculator business gave way to the Altair computer kit that provided a basic chassis with a passive motherboard, power supply, and front panel. Builders had to add a CPU board, built around an Intel 8080 microprocessor, and at least one memory board.
Most people know how the Altair inspired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to start Microsoft, so I won't repeat that story here. Roberts sold MITS in 1977, went to medical school, and became a physician in a rural Georgia town.
The Altair also inspired several hardware competitors such as IMSAI, Vector Graphics, and PolyMorphic Systems as well as companies that created software.
Read more at Herb Johnson's Web site: www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/s100.html that includes many links to other interesting and informative sites. See also: www.digibarn.com/stories/MITS/index.html.
Once in a while you can find a complete Altair on ebay and add-on boards pop up from time to time, too. I still have two Altairs but neither worked very well. --Jon Titus
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