Ed Roberts (computers)

Henry Edward Roberts (born 1942) was the founder and president of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) which built the Altair 8800, one of the very first hobbyist personal computers.

He grew up in Miami, Florida, where he attended the University of Miami and majored in electrical engineering. He joined the Air Force in 1962, and stayed in the service for 10 years, finding enough time along the way to finish his engineering degree at Oklahoma State University

As a teenager, he created circuitry for analog and digital computers. A member of the United States Air Force, he earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Oklahoma State University, and was assigned to an Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas, where in his spare time he established two electronics companies, Reliance Engineering and Reliable Radio and TV.

In 1968, he was assigned to the research laboratory division of Kirtland Air Force base in New Mexico, where he met Forrest Mims III. Reunited with a college friend Stan Cagle and an officer Bob Zaller, the four established MITS to sell rocket telemetry systems for hobbyists. In the fall of 1970, the company split up over a disagreement about the direction of the company, as Roberts wanted to start producing calculators, while Cagle and Mims wanted to create an infrared alarm system. Roberts and a friend bought out Cagle and Mims, although Mims would later return to write technical manuals.

Roberts wrote a featured article in the November 1971 issue of Popular Electronics about the MITS 816 calculator kit, and the business began to earn a profit. By 1974, however, competing companies were making the kits obsolete, so Roberts created the Altair 8800 and wrote a related article that was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. This article excited a Harvard University undergraduate named Bill Gates, and his good friend Paul Allen, and the duo contacted Roberts to write a BASIC interpreter for the machine. Roberts agreed to hire them, and Gates dropped out of Harvard. Later, Gates and Allen would leave MITS to begin a company called MicroSoft. The article would also inspire the creation of the Homebrew Computer Club by a group of Altair 8800 enthusiasts, and from this club emerged twenty-three computer companies, including a company called Apple Computer (now known as Apple, Inc.).

In 1977, MITS was bought by Pertec Computer Corporation for upwards of $6 million, and Roberts entered medical school at Mercer University. He is now a country doctor in Cochran, Georgia.