Ed Roberts (computer engineer)

Henry Edward Roberts (September 13, 1941 – April 1, 2010) was an American engineer, entrepreneur and medical doctor who invented the first commercially successful personal computer in 1974.

He is most often known as "the father of the personal computer."

Roberts was born on September 13, 1941, in Miami, Florida, to Henry Melvin Roberts, an appliance repairman, and Edna Wilcher Roberts, a registered nurse.

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 & 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.

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.

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.

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.