Henry “Ed” Roberts

inducted in the class of 2000

Notable accomplishments:

• Founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to sell various electronics, including a calculator kit (1971)
• Designed the Altair 8800 kit computer, the first kit computer to become popular (1975)
• Hired Paul Allen and Bill Gates to lead software development for MITS (1975)

Quotes:
“The basic ground rules for a personal computer from a technical standpoint is that it had to be a real, fully operational computer that was fully expandable and at least in principal could do anything that a general purpose minicomputer of the time could do. “Minicomputer” was the term them and referred to any 16-bit or 8-bit machine. And, those were the ground rules. We wanted to make a machine that was, from a users stand-point, not degenerative at all. The main difference between our machine and where others were, is that we used microprocessors and everything was the latest state of the art. We never used core memory even though we did look at core. At the time we began work on the Altair, core memory was still significantly cheaper than IC based memory.” (Classically Brewed magazine, 1997)

“There was a dentist in Chicago who was one of our very first customers. He wanted to use the Altair to control a massive model railroad. And that was a real eye opener to us that people were coming up with applications and ideas that we had never even imagined.” (Classically Brewed magazine, 1997)

Suggested reading:
“Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer” by Stan Veit (1993)

“History of Computing Hardware (1960s-Present)” by Frederic P. Miller, Agnes F. Vandome and John McBrewster (2010)

Learn more:
Mercer University School of Medicine page about Dr. Ed Roberts