Henry Edward Roberts, known as Ed Roberts, was the founder of MITS and the principal designer of the Altair 8800, the machine that launched the personal-computer industry. For that reason he is frequently described as the father of the personal computer. His story is documented firsthand in an oral-history interview conducted by historian David Greelish in early 1995 at Roberts’s office in Cochran, Georgia, held in the Computer History Museum’s collection.
In that interview Roberts describes founding MITS with United States Air Force friends as a company making electronics for model rockets, then moving into telemetry and electronic calculator kits. When the calculator market collapsed and prices fell below his costs, the company was deeply in debt. Roberts decided that the way out was to build something no one else was offering at a hobbyist price: a real computer. He chose Intel’s new 8080 microprocessor and negotiated a low per-unit price by committing to volume, then designed a kit around it that an enthusiast could assemble.
The result, the Altair 8800, appeared as the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover story, with Roberts as a co-author of the construction article. He had hoped to sell a few hundred to stay solvent; instead, as he recounts, the response was overwhelming and MITS received orders by the thousand. Roberts also describes the surrounding ecosystem that grew up around the Altair: the third-party companies making boards and software for its open bus, and the licensing of Altair BASIC from the young Microsoft, whose co-founder Paul Allen briefly worked at MITS.
Roberts’s design decisions shaped the early industry. Bringing the 8080’s bus out to expansion slots created what became the S-100 standard and made the Altair a platform rather than a single product. The machine’s success demonstrated that ordinary people would buy a personal computer, a proposition that had been far from obvious, and it drew in the entrepreneurs and hobbyists who built the companies of the following years.
After selling MITS to Pertec in 1977, Roberts left the computer business entirely. He went to medical school and practiced as a small-town physician in Georgia for the rest of his career, an unusual second act for a founding figure of an industry. He died in 2010, by which point his role in starting the personal-computer revolution was widely recognized, including by figures such as Bill Gates and Paul Allen who had gotten their own start writing software for his machine.