Ed Roberts died yesterday in Georgia. He was the founder of MiTS, the designer of the Altair 8800 and as close to being the father of the American personal computer as anyone can get. I say the American personal computer because French readers constantly correct me on this. Where, again, are all those French computer companies?
I knew Ed Roberts, though not very well. I never worked for or with him but I met him many times even years after he gave up computers for medicine in his late 30’s. That transition from digital hardware to medicine is key to Ed’s story and I think provides the crux of this column, which is just one of probably dozens of published remembrances of the man.
Ed sold MiTS and started medical school less than three years after introducing the Altair 8800. In one sense this could be seen as a logical transition from a dodgy electronic kit company that had almost gone under many times. It was Ed cashing-in to some degree and assuring the financial health of his family. But it was also much more. It was a recognition that even in 1978 Ed Roberts was being left behind by computing.
It was an amazing experience to visit Ed’s medical practice, which was run with the help of many computers — MiTS computers. More than two decades past the height of his success, Roberts was still using he same hardware and using it well. In addition to Altairs with 8080 processors there were 8088’s, 8086’s, and even Motorola 68000’s. And every one of those was running some medical or back-office application connected to a terminal.
Twenty years into his medical career Ed could still program his Altairs in assembler. So it isn’t that he lost his touch for technology. It’s that his era had passed. Ed’s was the era of ascii terminal computing. An ADM3a was Ed’s violin. And an Apple II (worse still a Macintosh or even a Windows box) was, therefore, his nemesis.
Linux might have called him back but by the time it was available Ed wasn’t.
Think back a couple columns to that discussion of engineers and their half-lives. Suddenly Ed leaving Albuquerque with a pocketful of money makes a lot of sense. He was two half-lives (75 percent depleted) into his digital career. It was time for something new. And that’s not sad in any way, because Ed Roberts got to have two careers, two professional adventures, and did a great job with both.
Sorry to hear about this I am sure he had a great time building and using the “old School” PC. My condolences to his family and friends.
I sometimes miss the days before Windows, in the early 80’s 8-bit era of Apple/Commodore/IBM. Those were good times for a teenager, like I was, learning all the cool things that computers could do as obviously, from this article, Ed still loved those “old school” systems too.
Thanks again, Bob for the nice article.
In case you missed it, you can get a glimpse of the Altair on Bob’s documentary he did for PBS, in case you haven’t seen it, which I would think most have by now.
Ed got out before that transition.
Before, computers were machines that did what you wanted, if you knew how to tell them so.
After, computers were appliances that did what you expected, if you knew where to buy the code.
“After, computers were appliances that did what you expected, if you knew where to buy the code.”
I think linux users would disagree with that statement. 😉
Besides, when I got my first computer, it came with zero software and the software was not abundant. I learned how to write my own software. So for me that was one of the best aspects.
Sorry to hear of his passing.
I lived this history. I bought a copy of that Popular Electric issue that had the Altair 8800 article in it.
The Intel 8080 was pretty new at the time. With a coworker on the job we put together an Altair 680. It was a Motorola 6800 based box. Since it had an eprom monitor program, it didn’t have all the switches and LED’s across the front of the case. The Altair 8800 looked like the minicomputer of the day.
The guys that should be thankful that there was an Ed Roberts are Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They made fortunes because of the opportunity Ed Roberts gave them. Wonder if they will send flowers to the funeral?
History would have been very different without Ed Roberts.
Gates visited Roberts the week before he died. So yeah – I think it’s safe to say he was grateful.
Your bits about Ed Roberts in Triumph of the Nerds were good, the comments yesterday by Gates and Allen about Ed shows a great deal of respect for the chance he gave them, but…
“Where, again, are all those French computer companies?”
Dunno, but I know a lot of big French medical and pharmaceutical companies. Maybe they gave up competing with silicon valley and went into medicine like Ed Roberts? What was your point? Than pioneers always come out on top? If so I think your TV series need some serious re-editing.
Anyways… If I ever was to buy a PC myself instead of building it from (Taiwanese) parts – could you recommend me a good American brand? Where they talk English-English or American-English and not Indian English? Thought so…
And no, I’m not French.
There is no such thing as an American computer company, just an American companies collecting all the profits for assembling components made in third world countries.
I wouldn’t call Taiwan a “third world country.” Neither would I apply that term to South Korea. Even if some of these guys are subbing some of their work to China, China is, in fact, the third largest economy in the world, soon to surpass Japan. We’re not talking shirts here, we’re talking high tech electronics.
And yeah, I once considered buying an Altair, as well as an Imsai. I almost bought an Apple II but the jackass salesman wouldn’t let me touch the machine. I finally ended up with a Commodore 64 and then didn’t touch computers until Windows 95.
Riiight Chris.
Yes, those components are made mostly in Taiwan, but the underlying architecture they’re based on can all trace their lineage directly back to American designed and built components of the 70s – which is the point Bob was trying to make. Even today, most of the architecture is still designed in the US.
You may not be French, but based on the way you latched on to one of the article’s minor side comments and responded with a tiresome passive-aggressive reply, I’d be willing to bet you’re Canadian. Grow a thicker skin and stop looking for ways to be offended.
In before Freedom Fries, We Saved Your Ass During WW2 and “WMD, I Want to Believe”
Anyway don’t troll-bait and act surprised when you got a response.
That’s the best eulogy I read on the man. I learned about Ed Roberts on your “Triumph of the Nerds” and always admired him for his willingness to leave the computer field to pursue a medical career.
I *just* watched Triumph a few weeks ago for the first time since it was on TV. I, too, considered buying the kit from a Popular Science ad, but didn’t want to learn assembly when I could play (ASCII) “Star Trek” on my high school’s TTY! Rock on, Ed.
I’m sure most of us would be earning 3x more (while working 3-4 days a week) had we gone into medicine instead of this fickle biz. Nobody in the US off-shores their health care, except maybe Andy Kaufman.
Some insurance companies are already sending patients to other (cheaper) countries for medical procedures.
I worked for Ed. A year or two, I forget. Even remember the day Bill and company visited, however I was not part of the inner circle so I don’t know much more.
“Dodgy” was a good term to use to describe the company. It was also easy to understand why it failed.
I was always struck my his management style. I met him on the day of my hire and never saw him again, even though he was located not 50 feet from where I worked, and that was on a main passage way.
The engineers were all young, with very little practical experience, so mistakes where made. Many of the designs show signs of inspiration but usually were hampered by silly errors.
I’ve made my mistakes too. With any luck I might have been befriended Bill while he worked on that first Basic while in Albuquerque. I’d like to be counting those billions.
Greg wrote, “Many of the designs show signs of inspiration but usually were hampered by silly errors.” As a former MITS customer, I can attest to that.
Back in 1976 I worked in a Princeton University lab where we were attempting to use Altair 8800s to control experimental apparatus. We had three of the machines, but never managed to get more than one working at the same time–and sometimes not even one would work reliably. They were flaky, quirky, temperamental beasts, and eventually we gave up on them.
I also remember the problems with MITS’s badly designed 4KB dynamic RAM cards, which were so notorious that they gave DRAM a bad reputation (at least in the home computer market) for years thereafter. Typical design flaws in both the Altairs and the DRAM cards included obvious no-nos such as open-loop timing that tended to drift, rather than clocked/synchronized refreshes.
I don’t argue with anything Bob says in his eulogy. Ed Roberts deserves full credit for starting an industry. But his products–at least, the ones I had personal experience with–were poorly engineered and unreliable. It could be argued that Ed did the industry almost as big a favor by leaving it as he did by starting it.
I was introduced into personal computing in grad school (Genetics) in early ’80s:
FLEX OS running on a SouthWest Technical Products (SWTP) with a Motorola 6809 on the SS50 bus.
I wrote a BASIC program to sort and format the index of a book: it would work the two 8-inch floppy drives so hard, the drive chain would occasionally jump off of the spindle sprocket. :^)
Sorry to know Ed Roberts pass away. We all in IT business are in debt with him.
Once again, thanks to you Bob for (doing your job of) telling us of him in “Accidental Empires” and the movie, and in this blog.
When I heard of Ed’s passing, it felt like I’d lost an uncle, someone I rarely saw in person but whose name was always a topic of lively, good humored conversations at every family gathering.
He was I suppose, one of those rare centers of gravity, around which the whole tech industry has spun.
Fondest of wishes to his family and friends from me, just another nerd.
I’m amused about how MITS started out as a Model Rocketry electronics company. Thus Model Rocketry was an influence in the genesis of the home computer.
Hear, hear. A fitting tribute to a man who has shaped many many lives.
I bought both model rocket parts and an 8800a computer from MITS in their early days. I have very happy memories of the hours designing hardware and software for that PC.
I still have that Popular Electronics article. I was very tempted to buy and make that kit. I was doing computer programming at the time and knew I’d need a terminal, printer, and other stuff to be able to really do something with a home built computer. That took it out of range of my time and money.
A few years later there was another epic article in either Popular Electronics or Radio Electronics. It was the $500 AT clone. Up to that point a PC had its CPU, and a ton of other chips. Then the chip industry started making “core chip sets” which provided most to the peripheral electronics needed for the CPU. It simplified the design and drastically cut the cost.
It is interesting to note, IBM was one of the last firms to use the core chip sets. They kept shipping expensive 8mhz AT’s, while everyone else was going to 10, 12, and 16 mhz for a lot less money. Then to regain its market position, IBM came up with the microchannel. And as they say, the rest is history.
Mr. Roberts was definitely a trailblazer and we all owe him a debt of gratitude.
It is also interesting to note publications like Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics no longer exist. Firms like HeathKit and SWTP are gone too.
It all happened in the 1980’s and 90’s as USA corporations eliminated R&D, cut engineering departments, and our youth pursued other career interests.
Maybe Ed Roberts was smarter than we think. He took stock of his situation and decided to hit the ‘re-start’ button and move on to another career. How many of us would, if we could, at a point earlier in our careers, hit the ‘re-start’ button and move on to some thing different (not necessarily better)?!
In the mid-70’s I took a computer programming class in high school. We’d dial a 300 baud modem, listen for the ‘sound’ (think picking up a call from a fax machine!) and then jam it into a coupler to connect up a ‘terminal’ (see ‘glorified noisey printer’ with a keyboard) then were suppose to input our BASIC language programs. I, like many others, instead of programming, played games (Star Trek). I should have done a better job in that class….
I really like girls with open mouths and discovered femaletongues.com which seems to be the best place for pictures of female tongues, pierced tongues, and sexy girls with open mouths.
That makes me realize that, up until now, Bob must have been doing a great job monitoring spam. Hope all is well.
I remember in the 80’s when “stupid” people used Macintosh and the ‘real’ computer users (DOS users) turned their noses up at the Mac guys. Though I did both, this post reminds of a time long past when improvements that made computers easier where thought to reduce function and waste resources. The last vestiges of that faded out in the mid 90’s.
You are so right on the 1/2 life of engineers….
–David
I always wondered what you meant in triumph of the nerds about the French, now i know.
God bless you Ed, the people that matter will spare a thought and be sad at your departure and the ones that don’t matter will be on twitter telling us what they had for breakfast.
R.I.P. Ed.
One of the big, rich French companies is Schlumberger. The largest oil field logging company in the world. They provide up-to-date hardware and software for the oil industry.
Again Bob gave us a different insight and connected the story with our actual life, thanks.
If you haven’t read it yet, the Bill Gates tribute to Ed Roberts:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/02/bill-gates-remembers-personal-computer-pioneer/
Both the MITS computers and Ed had the ‘Dazzler’ option.
To call an Altar a Personal Computer is nuts! There was nothing personal about it. Was it a mini computer, absolutely. When I got my first Apple II and it said “Apple II Person Computer” on the side of the box that was the truth!
RIP Ed Roberts, the father of the personal computer.
For those who wonder if Bill Gates & Paul Allen were grateful for Ed Roberts’ generosity and contributions to personal computing, read this: https://www.thegatesnotes.com/Thinking/article.aspx?ID=126
Maybe the French personal computers were all connected to phone lines? Minitel? OK, maybe this is reaching just a little bit, but it was France’s introduction to being online and connected, what, maybe 10 or even 15 years before the rest of the world?
And no I’m not French either, and I was too impoverished to afford one as well.
[…] might have something to do with the fact that, as author and columnist “Bob Cringely” reports, Edwards was firmly rooted in the era of ascii terminal computing . More than two […]
“15 year half life” is the wrong way to look at it.
You just have to reinvent yourself in this business every so often. I seem to do it on 7 year cycles, mostly. Stop doing what is comfortable. Figure out some trend likely to pan out for at least a few years. and then jump.
Time works wonders.
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