Ed Roberts (computer engineer)

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Ed Roberts (computer engineer) : biography

September 13, 1941 – April 1, 2010

Roberts married Joan Clark while at the university, and when she became pregnant Roberts knew he would have to drop out of school to support his new family. The U.S. Air Force had a program that would pay for college, and in May 1962 he enlisted with the hope of finishing his degree through the Airman Education & Commissioning Program.Zannos (2003), 18–19.

After basic training Roberts attended the Cryptographic Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Because of his electrical engineering studies at college, Roberts was made an instructor at the Cryptographic School when he finished the course. To augment his meager enlisted man’s pay, Roberts worked on several off-duty projects and even set up a one man company, Reliance Engineering. The most notable job was to create the electronics that animated the Christmas characters in the window display of Joske’s department store in San Antonio. In 1965 he was selected for an Air Force program to complete his college degree and become a commissioned officer. Roberts earned an electrical engineering degree from Oklahoma State University in 1968 and was assigned to the Laser Division of the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico.Mims (1986), 24–27.

Sale to Pertec

In 1976, MITS had 230 employees and sales of $6 million. Roberts was tiring of his management responsibilities and was looking for a larger partner. MITS had always used Pertec Computer Corporation disk drives and on December 3, 1976, Pertec signed a letter of intent to acquire MITS for $6 million in stock.Manes (1994), 101. The deal was completed in May 1977 and Roberts’ share was $2 million.Young (1998), 174. The Altair products were merged into the Pertec line, and the MITS facility was used to produce the PCC-2000 small-business computer. The Albuquerque plant was closed in December 1980 and the production was moved to the Pertec plants in Irvine, California.

Medical doctor

In late 1977 Roberts returned to rural Georgia and bought a large farm in Wheeler County where he had often visited his grandparents’ home in his youth.Roberts’ farm was about . Siliconnections (Mims (1986), page 48) states . The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (April 27, 1997) states . He had a non-compete agreement with Pertec covering hardware products, so he became a gentleman farmer and started a software company. His age could have thwarted his dream of becoming a medical doctor, but nearby Mercer University started a medical school in 1982. Roberts was in the first class and graduated with an M.D. in 1986. He did his residency in internal medicine and in 1988 established a practice in the small town of Cochran, Georgia.Zannos (2003), 39–42. In 2009, Dr. Roberts was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, the medical honor society, based on his dual accomplishment of developer of the first personal computer and his devotion to rural medicine.

Altair BASIC

Bill Gates was a student at Harvard University and Paul Allen worked for Honeywell in Boston when they saw the Altair computer on the cover of Popular Electronics. They had previously written software for the earlier Intel 8008 microprocessor and knew the Intel 8080 was powerful enough to support a BASIC interpreter. They sent a letter to MITS claiming to have a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 microprocessor. Roberts was interested, so Gates and Allen began work on the software. Both had experience with the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 minicomputers that they would use. Allen modified the DEC Macro Assembler to produce code for the Intel 8080 and wrote a program to emulate the 8080 so they could test their BASIC without having an Altair computer. Using DEC’s BASIC-PLUS language as a guide, Gates determined what features would work with the limited resources of the Altair computer. Gates then started writing the 8080 assembly-language code on yellow legal pads. In February Gates and Allen started using a PDP-10 at Harvard to write and debug BASIC. They also enlisted another Harvard student, Monte Davidoff, to write the floating-point math routines.Manes (1994), 68–73.