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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.
2010 - 1941 = 69
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.
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.
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.
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..