Ed Roberts
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ED ROBERTS 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.
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 an agreement 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 with Bill Yates 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 little 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 little company called Apple Computer.
In 1977, MITS was bought by Pertec Computer Corporation, and Roberts entered medical school at Mercer University. He is now a country doctor in the United States.