Ed Roberts (computer engineer) Inventions Information

Henry Edward "Ed" Roberts (September 13, 1941 – April 1, 2010) was an American engineer, entrepreneur and medical doctor who invented the first commercially successful personal computer in 1975. He is most often known as "the father of the personal computer". He founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in 1970 to sell electronics kits to model rocketry hobbyists, but the first successful product was an electronic calculator kit that was featured on the cover of the November 1971 issue of Popular Electronics. The calculators were very successful and sales topped one million dollars in 1973. A brutal calculator price war left the company deeply in debt by 1974. Roberts then developed the Altair 8800 personal computer that used the new Intel 8080 microprocessor. This was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, and hobbyists flooded MITS with orders for this $397 computer kit.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen joined MITS to develop software and Altair BASIC was Microsoft's first product. Roberts sold MITS in 1977 and retired to Georgia where he farmed, studied medicine and eventually became a small-town doctor living in Cochran, Georgia.

Roberts was born on September 13, 1941 in Miami, Florida to Henry Melvin Roberts, an appliance repairman, and Edna Wilcher Roberts, a homemaker. His younger sister Cheryl was born in 1947. During World War II, while his father was in the Army, Roberts and his mother lived on the Wilcher family farm in Wheeler County, Georgia. After the war, the family returned to Miami, but Roberts would spend his summers with his grandparents in rural Georgia. Roberts' father had an appliance repair business in Miami.

Roberts became interested in electronics and built a small relay-based computer while in high school. Medicine was his true passion, however, and he entered University of Miami with the intention of becoming a doctor, the first in his family to attend college. There he met a neurosurgeon who shared his interest in electronics. The doctor suggested that Roberts get an engineering degree before applying to medical school, and Roberts changed his major to electrical engineering.

Roberts married Joan Clark while at the university, and when she became pregnant Roberts knew that 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 and Commissioning Program.

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. In 1968, he looked into applying to medical school but learned that, at age 27, he was considered too old.

Roberts worked with Forrest Mims at the Weapons Laboratory, and both shared an interest in model rocketry. Mims was an advisor to the Albuquerque Model Rocket Club and met the publisher of Model Rocketry magazine at a rocketry conference. This led to an article in the September 1969 issue of Model Rocketry, "Transistorized Tracking Light for Night Launched Model Rockets". Roberts, Mims, and lab coworkers Stan Cagle and Bob Zaller decided that they could design and sell electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists. Roberts wanted to call the new company Reliance Engineering, but Mims wanted to form an acronym similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT. Cagle came up with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). They advertised the light flasher, a roll rate sensor with transmitter, and other kits in Model Rocketry, but the sales were disappointing.

Mims wrote an article about the new technology of light-emitting diodes that was to be published in the November 1970 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. He asked the editors if they also wanted a project story, and they agreed. Roberts and Mims developed an LED communicator that would transmit voice on an infrared beam of light to a receiver hundreds of feet away. Readers could buy a kit of parts to build the Opticom LED Communicator from MITS for $15. MITS sold just over a hundred kits. Mims was now out of the Air Force and wanted to pursue a career as a technology writer. Roberts bought out his original partners and focused the company on the emerging market of electronic calculators.

Roberts's first real experience with computers came while at Oklahoma State University where engineering students had free access to an IBM 1620 computer. His office at the Weapons Laboratory had the state of the art Hewlett-Packard 9100A programmable calculator in 1968. Roberts had always wanted to build a digital computer and, in July 1970, Electronic Arrays announced a set of six LSI integrated circuits that would make a four-function calculator. Roberts was determined to design a calculator kit and got fellow Weapons Laboratory officers William Yates and Ed Laughlin to invest in the project with time and money.

The first product was a "four-function" calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. The display was only eight digits, but the calculations were performed with 16 digits precision. The MITS Model 816 calculator kit was featured on the November 1971 cover of Popular Electronics. The kit sold for $179 and an assembled unit was $275. Unlike the previous kits that MITS had offered, thousands of calculator orders came in each month.

The monthly sales reached $100,000 in March 1973, and MITS moved to a larger building with 10,000 square feet (930 square meters) of space. In 1973, MITS was selling every calculator that they could make, and 110 employees worked in two shifts assembling them. The functionality of calculator integrated circuits increased at a rapid pace and Roberts was designing and producing new models. The popularity of electronic calculators drew the traditional office equipment companies and the semiconductor companies into the market. In September 1972, Texas Instruments (TI) introduced the TI-2500 portable four-function calculator that sold for $120. The larger companies could sell below cost to win market share. By early 1974, Ed Roberts found that he could purchase a calculator in a retail store for less than his cost of materials. MITS was now $300,000 in debt, and Roberts was looking for a new hit product.

Roberts decided to return to the kit market with a low cost computer. The target customer would think that "some assembly required" was a desirable feature. In April 1974, Intel released the 8080 microprocessor that Roberts felt was powerful enough for his computer kit, but each 8080 chip sold for $360 in small quantities. Roberts felt that the price of a computer kit had to be under $400; to meet this price, he agreed to order 1,000 microprocessors from Intel for $75 each. The company was down to 20 employees and a bank loan for $65,000 financed the design and initial production of the new computer. Roberts told the bank that he expected to sell 800 computers, but he guessed that it would be around 200.

Art Salsberg, editorial director of Popular Electronics, was looking for a computer construction project, and his technical editor Les Solomon knew that MITS was working on an Intel 8080-based computer kit. Roberts assured Solomon that the project would be complete by November to meet the press deadline for the January 1975 issue. The first prototype was finished in October and shipped to Popular Electronics in New York for the cover photograph, but it was lost in transit. Solomon already had a number of pictures of the machine, and the article was based on them. Roberts and Yates got to work on building a replacement. The computer on the magazine cover was an empty box with just switches and LEDs on the front panel. The finished Altair computer had a completely different circuit board layout than the prototype shown in the magazine.

MITS products typically had generic names such as the Model 1440 Calculator or the Model 1600 Digital Voltmeter. The editors of Popular Electronics wanted a more alluring name for the computer. MITS technical writer David Bunnell came up with three pages of possible names, but Roberts was too busy finishing the computer design to choose one. There are several versions of the story of who selected Altair as the computer name. At the first Altair Computer Convention (March 1976), Les Solomon told the audience that the name was inspired by his 12-year-old daughter Lauren. "She said why don't you call it Altair – that's where the [Star Trek] Enterprise is going tonight." The December 1976 issue of Popular Science misquoted this account, giving credit to Ed Roberts' daughter. His only daughter Dawn was not born until 1983. Both of these versions have appeared in many books, magazines, and web sites.

Editor Alexander Burawa recalls a less dramatic version. The Altair was originally going to be named the PE-8 (Popular Electronics 8-bit), but Les Solomon thought this name to be rather dull, so Solomon, Burawa, and John McVeigh decided that: "It's a stellar event, so let's name it after a star." McVeigh suggested "Altair", the twelfth-brightest star in the sky.

When the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics reached readers in mid-December 1974, MITS was flooded with orders. They had to hire extra people just to answer the phones. In February, MITS received 1,000 orders for the Altair 8800. The quoted delivery time was 60 days, but it was many more months before the machines were shipped. By August 1975, they had shipped over 5,000 computers.

The Altair 8800 computer was a break-even sale for MITS. They needed to sell additional memory boards, I/O boards, and other options to make a profit. The April 1975 issue of the MITS newsletter Computer Notes had a page-long price list that offered over 15 optional boards. The delivery time given was 60 or 90 days, but many items were never produced and dropped from future price lists. Initially, Roberts decided to concentrate on production of the computers. Prompt delivery of optional boards did not occur until October 1975.

There were several design and component problems in the MITS 4K Dynamic RAM board. By July, new companies such as Processor Technology were selling 4K Static RAM boards with the promise of reliable operation. Ed Roberts acknowledged the 4K Dynamic RAM board problems in the October 1975 Computer Notes. The price was reduced from $264 to $195 and existing purchasers got a $50 refund. MITS released its own 4K Static RAM board in January 1976.

Several other companies started making add-in boards and the first clone, the IMSAI 8080, was available in December 1975.

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