PC Pioneer, Altair Creator Dies At 68PC Pioneer, Altair Creator Dies At 68

Dr. Henry Edward Roberts, credited with building the first personal computer and a mentor to Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, has died of pneumonia.

Roberts died Thursday in a Macon, Ga., hospital, according to media reports. He was 68.

Roberts built the Altair 8800 and sold it as a build-it-yourself kit, which debuted in January 1975 on the cover of Popular Electronics. The article attracted the attention of Gates and Allen who contacted Roberts and offered to write software for the machine. Gates and Allen founded Microsoft in 1975 to develop and sell software for the Altair 8800.

"Ed was willing to take a chance on us -- two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace -- and we have always been grateful to him," Gates and Allen said Friday in a posting on the Microsoft blog. "The day our first untested software worked on his Altair was the start of a lot of great things."

Roberts sold the Altair 8800 through Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, which he co-founded in 1969 in Albuquerque, N.M. While the company expected to only sell a few hundred of the PCs, it ended up delivering more than 5,000 within seven months after it appeared on Popular Electronics. The Altair 8800 kit sold for $439. Assembled, the system cost $621.

The Altair 8800, with its full 1 MHz of power and 4 KB of memory, marked the advent of the PC era. A quarter of a century later, the industry shipped its 1 billionth PC, according to Gartner Dataquest.

Roberts sold MITS in 1977, studied medicine, and became a doctor in Georgia.

"More than anything, what we will always remember about Ed was how deeply compassionate he was -- and that was never more true than when he decided to spend the second half of his life going to medical school and working as a country doctor making house calls," Gates and Allen said.