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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.
This guy?
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2010 - 1941 = 69
Come on guys facts or basic math.
His age was computed using a Pentium, not an Altair.
The Altair really got the hobby computer market going. It was by no means perfect, but it was something that a lot of people were hungry for. I had the thrill of working in a retail computer store in 1978 when the IMSAI and Apple were going head-to-head. [IMSAI is a spelling error in this text entry box, which tells you who won.]
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
You probably don't realize it, but the PC you're using today is all thanks to the Altair.
It was revolutionary. It was groundbreaking. On one hand, it helped encourage Jobs and Woz to set up Apple. On the other, it was also responsible for the creation of Microsoft. But not only that, it showed that what was once a dream could become reality, and IBM made that dream the reality we enjoy today.
You will call the bus after it's inventor and not it's designation, in respect to it's inventor, but you can't do basic math in order to work out how old he was?
He invented also a device that moved him back 19 years. And his bio dont tell about the years he was hidden fearing facing his younger self. So we must thank him for personal computers and that the universe didnt got destroyed by a paradox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computer_engineer)
Yep. Must have been a Plentium 150. The dates are correct, just not the math.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Computer engineer Ed Roberts was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
I learned the basics of computer programming, initially on a MITS Altair 8800 in, 1976-77. It was an exciting time - computer kits sprung up like weeds. And, we computer geeks were born.
May he rest in peace.
Roberts died of pneumonia aged 68 in Georgia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computers). Link referenced in the summary for dog's sake...
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
I still have my Altair 680 in a closet somewhere. I paid 10 dollars for it at a ham radio fleamarket. A real bargain to own a piece of computing history.
Give it a rest, will you?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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."
http://www.digibarn.com/stories/MITS/index.html
the altair 8800 ran on an 8080 and you programmed it in octal.
Of course it was not octal. it was binary. there were 16 switches across the front.
these days most people represent binary numbers as hex. Ever wonder why Octal used to be so much more popular? when you write octal numbers they are really inconvenient so why use them?
Well the answer is, if you are keying in binary number in one switch at a time you can do it lightning fast in octal but not in hex.
with octal you use your middle, index and ring fingers and you can whip the switches up an down. While you do have four fingers you can't easily use all four fingers to slap the switches
try it, your fingers are not equally long, and it's hard to retract your fingers in all 16 possible positions.
octal is easy.
So you programmed altairs in octal.
the altair I used did not even have a boot loader. you just toggled in the binary to enter the boot loader then once you had that in you could read the casstte which had a longer more sphisticated boot loader. which then read in BASIC.
there was no OS. if you wanted an OS, you wrote it in basic as you needed it.
to enter the program into memory the altair used an interesting trick. the front panel switches could set the address counter to an address, which could then be incremented. You put the computer into a wait state to enter the data to be written to the memory, then advanced the address counter.
by the way the 6502 was a much better processor with a simpler but more sophisticated instruction set.
one reason I think the 8080/Z80-series beat the 6502 was an early version of the megahertz myth. The 4mhz base clock rate of the z80 was faster than the 6502's base clock rate of 1Mhz. But the z80 used 4 clock cycles and a few wait states for most instructions. the 6502 complete nearly every instruction in one instruction.
if only the altair had been 6502 based.
(the 6502 came out later in time of course, so it's understandable.. and there was a 6800-series version of the altair that never caught on).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Umm, KIND OF important, don't you think?
Oh well, may rest in peace...
ba-dum-bum.
To be fair, although very similar there were some minor differences between the Altair bus and the S-100 bus and what later became the IEEE-696 bus. But, yes, Altair did have the first bus to use the 100 pin connector using an edge connector and his design was the basis for the other 2 derivatives. The later IEEE-696 also specified a "double height" version of the card which provided more chip real estate than the relatively short (for the day) card specified in the original design.
It was a great breakthrough and he will be missed.
People needs to stop dying on April 1st. Nobody takes the news seriously (at first).
Ok, NOW we can give it a rest!
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.
Ed Roberts is now in Hell, and it is irrelevant that Ed Roberts boasted that he did not believe in Hell when he lived on earth. Be assured, Roberts believes in Hell now. Like the rich man the Lord Jesus told about in Luke 16, who died; “and in Hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus (the beggar on earth), that he may dip the tip ofhis finger in water, and cool mytongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” Lk. 16:23,24. When told that he could not have a drop ofwater, for ever, though tormented in flames, he begged for somebody to rise from the dead and preach to his kinfolk, lest they also die and come to this place of torment. Ed Roberts – the filthy blasphemer – the obscene potty-mouth skeptic, agnostic, and profane atheist – who had nothing but disdain for God and the Bible all the days of his tragic life – is now, at this minute and for ever writhing and screaming in exquisite pain – pleading for mercy from that God he flipped off while jacking off for MITS lucre. Roberts made lots of money making fun of God; now he must deal with God – face to face – for ever. “The Lord thy God repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them; he will not be slack to him that hateth him, he will repay him to his face.” Deut. 7:10. When Roberts died he split Hell wide open at once; as it is written: “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? The worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee.” Isa. 14:9,10. Ed Roberts is in Hell. Deal with it. You will soon join him. America is Doomed.
Definitely. Especially when Slashdot claims to employ editors.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
When did Fred Phelps' little family of douchebags start trolling /.?
If you're going to heaven, and Ed Roberts is in Hell, then I think I'd rather go where he is.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This man did many things and touched many lives. Bill Gates's and Paul Allen's, included. FTA:
Roberts founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, which sold the kits. A young Gates and Allen would later found their fledgling Microsoft firm in Albuquerque, N.M., where MITS was based, and provide a computer language that helped hobbyists program and operate the Altair.
After selling his company, he tries both farming, and then medicine. (He's in his 40s at this time.)
He sold his company in 1977 and retired to a life of vegetable farming in rural Georgia before going to medical school and getting a medical degree from Mercer University, in 1986.
Roberts worked as an internist, seeing as many as 30 patients a day
Talk about multi-dimensional..
lol
From wikipedia: Henry Edward "Ed" Roberts (September 13, 1941 – April 1, 2010)
So he actually died at 68.
(and everyone knows that 68 in hex is 88 in base 12)
I programmed using the Altair 8800 when I was 16 and attending university at Simon Fraser in British Columbia. You really learned how to program effectively when flipping those switches.
booosh!
LOL
Why did you feed the auto-troll? I am more demanding of my trolls. They have to work for their treats.
I think nearly every time a submission is made on Slashdot about somebody passing on a lazy troll takes out this troll form and replaces the name. I have seen it quite often and in several places.
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.
Ed Roberts is now in Hell
Damn, I never knew God hated the Altair so much...
Bow-ties are cool.
All those wonderful indexing modes... the dual stack pointers... relative everything for PI code... what a great instruction set.
The downfall was it was random logic inside, and they hit a speed wall they couldn't get past.
I missed that thing so bad I wrote a complete emulation, from mpu to OS (flex09) to drives to terminal and graphics card. Now I'll always have it. Nothing like a little 6809 assembler to relax by.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
MBT has a lot of men’s MBT shoes and women shoes that have provided comfort shoes for some with back, ankle and foot problems. MBT have a vast collection of women's MBT shoes, Mary Janes and Kayak sandals. Men's MBT sport shoes, scandals, formal wear and work shoes.The company touts that the MBT shoes provide comfort for the back, hip, leg, ankle and foot areas. Improve the wearer’s posture, gait, stress on knees and joints.
Check it out on YouTube if you haven't already seen it.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=triumph+of+the+nerds&aq=f
Depends on the Month as well as the year. I was born 1949 and by your figures (2010-1949) I should be 61. I was born in late December of 49 and my age is 60 at present, which it will be until my birthday in December.
I am about to -- or I am going to -- die: either expression is correct.
Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian, d. 1702
I'm still wondering when someone is going to make a "handheld" Altair, reproducing some of the looks and most of the functions (except for plugin cards) and selling it on ThinkGeek or somesuch for a reasonable price. I want to play around with an Altair, but I'm not going to get one of those huge replicas: http://www.altairkit.com/index.html
Well, Altair *did* kill quite a lot of templars.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
It seems that the pneumonia was coused by Swine Flu
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 ...
Adequate vitamin D (the sunlight vitamin) helps prevent pneumonia:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pneumonia+vitamin+d
At the end of the winter, Ed Roberts' vitamin D supplies would have been depleted.
The right amount of vitamin D also helps prevent influenza, cancer, heart disease, and a variety of other illnesses:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
All computers should come with a warning label about this, IMHO. :-)
http://blogs.intel.com/csr/2010/02/with_all_of_the_debate.php
I'd suggest it is possible that vitamin D deficiency is the leading cause of death of computer users including most slashdotters. See also:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
At the time Sperry/Burroughs merged to form Unisys it was rumoured that Sperry's word processing software rejected "unisys" and suggested "anuses" as a likely fix.