H. Edward Roberts has died – with Bill Gates going to Georgia to be with him.
His claim to fame was he was the man behind the Altair computer – one of the first computers small and cheap enough to be used by a small business. That’s how Gates got started developing software. My memory of Altair was they had no interest in having 20 something young programmers try out their systems – if you didn’t walk in with checkbook in hand, you were shooed away. They flamed out pretty fast – being replaced by Radio Shack and Commodore, and the ultimately IBM and Apple.
