Ed Roberts has died.
So who's he? He's the guy who invented the Altair 8800, one of the first personal computers -- and arguably the first PC to be a sales success -- and the guy who gave Bill Gates a job writing software for it.
More about Ed, Bill, and the birth of the PC, after the jump.
The thing about the Altair is that nobody expected it to do very well. This was still the era when mainframes ruled -- and mainframes were typically used by governments or very large corporations. They were only just starting to be used by smaller businesses.
Since these big computers were used almost solely for mathematical computation -- there was no such thing as word-processing software, and computer graphics was still in its infancy, as were computer games -- nobody really thought that anyone but hobbyists would be interested in having a small-scale version for use in the home.
So when the Altair 8800 -- or usually, the kit to build it -- was first put on sale in January of 1975, Ed Roberts thought he might sell a few hundred units all told. Instead, thousands were ordered in the first month alone. By the time he sold the business in 1977 to go off to pursue his first love, medicine, as a country doctor in Georgia, Altairs were a $13-million-a-year business.
Unfortunately, the Altair didn't long survive after Roberts sold it off, but by then its place in history -- and the Altair BASIC programming written for it and soon adapted to other machines -- was secure, and the personal-computing revolution was launched.
Here's to Dr. Ed Roberts, the man who helped make what we're doing possible. Salut!