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Ed Roberts, Personal Computer Pioneer, 1941-2010
jcr writes "CNET and the Huffington Post both report the death of Henry Edward Roberts, best known to all of us as the inventor of the Altair computer, at the age of 68 from pneumonia. As it happens, I never got to use an Altair, but I did meet Ed once, back in the mid-1980s. Since that time, I've never referred to the Altair bus as the 'S100' bus, since I agree with him that an inventor is entitled to name his invention." Updated 7:40 GMT by timothy: Roberts was 68, not 88 as originally stated; thanks to the readers who pointed out the typo.
Sometime around 1987 or so, he was working on a startup called "Georgia Medical Electronics", and his plan was to make very cheap, stackable modules that had an Altair-bus on the top and the bottom, so you could snap a CPU together with a disk module and a power control module and have a simple process control computer for a factory (for example). My partner at the time was one of the few people left who remembered how to write a CP/M BIOS, and we went down to Atlanta to talk to him about working together. It didn't pan out, but I was glad to get the chance to meet him.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
A friend built one. Pretty cool machine - well designed and it worked very well. I waited and built a SOL machine for myself and it was lots of fun, too. I was "lucky" enough to have an ASR-33 to hook to it and loaded programs from paper tape. With a 32K expansion board I could run 32K Basic and there were many evenings when I started the machine up, loaded the OS from tape then put the 32K Basic tape in the reader, hit start, and went out for dinner. Assuming nothing went wrong it'd be at a READY prompt in a little over 1/2 hour.
What's kind of funny in a strange way is that 32K Basic was a Bill Gates project. I remember having a problem one day, calling for help and speaking with him on the phone about it. He solved my problem for me - and I never imagined that things would turn out the way they have. The days are long gone when you'd toggle in the bootloader from the front panel - or get technical support from Bill Gates.
Things have changed a lot since then - I'm still quite amused by the current crop of "hackers" who think they're all that but never built their own computer from chips and raw PC boards. Building a PC these days is something grade school kids can do.
I read a pretty interesting book about IMSAI a while back, and how they self-destructed. Apparently, their management was all caught up in the "EST" cult, so they simply ignored any negative information at all. Instead of dealing with problems, they fired anyone who insisted on mentioning them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Interesting, but I don't think that's the only reason octal used to be more popular than hex.
Although hexadecimal was introduced very early in computer history, it was generally rejected early on. There was little agreement on how to represent digits greater than 9, and it seems many people found the idea of using letters for numerical digits to be highly objectionable.
Octal didn't have that problem, and it was a natural fit for computers of the 1950s and early 1960s. Many of these used 6-bit characters (upper case only) and had word sizes which were multiples of 6. For example, all of DEC's systems developed before the PDP-11 had such word sizes, as did IBM's 700 and 7000 series of scientific systems. On such systems, words and characters would cleanly fit into an even number of octal digits.
Even on the PDP-11, which had 16-bit words and 8-bit characters, octal was still preferred. The PDP-11's binary instruction format, which had 3-bit specifiers for its registers and addressing modes, made it much simpler to read and write PDP-11 machine code in octal than in hex.
IBM's System/360, which had 8-bit characters, 32-bit words, and byte-addressable memory, had a big effect in making hexadecimal popular in the computing world, but it took time for the shift to fully take place. I think part of the reason octal was still used with the Altair was persistence of octal's old dominance.
2010 - 1941 = 69
Interestingly enough, at any given time if you were to ask the man what number he was thinking of, that would have been his reply!
Clearly he had some kind of latent premonition of his death.
Bow-ties are cool.
The man was one of the pioneers of the industry. I sure wish I could find one of those original 8800's to stick on a shelf. Maybe make it do one of those Cylon-like LED scans back and forth! Talk about bringing back memories! I worked on one of those in school, repairing and calibrating the cassette interface! It's what got me hooked on computers. As I recall, after manually entering the boot-loader via the toggle switches and loading BASIC off the cassette tape we had 1444 bytes free or something like that! All those toggle switches and lights, blinking and flashing, flashing and blinking ...
I remember those days, and you're right about keying octal. I remember being amazed at how fast I ultimately loaded the cassette bootloader in memory! I seem to remember something like 1444 bytes free after loading the BASIC interpreter.
I blame that blasted machine for being in this industry!
Yes, I've stumbled once, while under wiki effect, on the info that somebody still makes them; without the volume info though, nice to see they are not dead yet (with apologies to general Franco ;) )
Still, no clear & big descendants, and in the meantime many new widely succesfull players in microcontroller market have shown up and are bound to show...
One that hath name thou can not otter