First PC Creator Dies

[NickFitz]

I'm surprised this hasn't already been posted: Dr Henry Edward Roberts, creator of the MITS Altair 8800, has died.

The Altair 8800 was the first "Personal Computer", so called because you could own one without needing an air-conditioned room full of people in white coats as it was built around one of those new-fangled microprocessors. Its creation inspired some college students to write a BASIC interpreter for it, and to sell that interpreter they formed a company called Microsoft.

If Dr Roberts hadn't done it, somebody else would have created a computer anybody could own. But he did it first, and as anybody who was around in those days knows (hi Zeity ) he changed the world.

RIP Dr Roberts, and many thanks for making the world a better place for us all

[darmstadt]

Maybe I'll have to get one of these to wear at work now

Not too different to what I started working on which now looks like this.

[BrollyBonce]

The Altair 8800 was the first "Personal Computer", so called because you could own one without needing an air-conditioned room full of people in white coats as it was built around one of those new-fangled microprocessors. Its creation inspired some college students to write a BASIC interpreter for it, and to sell that interpreter they formed a company called Microsoft.

NF, did you copy 'n' paste that paragraph from somewhere and forget the [ quote ] delimiters? There are so many inaccuracies in it that I don't think it is your words.

I really, really hate to question you, but I believe the term "personal computer" did not come along until some years later. And then it was a marketing term ("You need one because you are important"), not a technical term.

Also, the minicomputers had for some time eradicated the need for air-conditioned rooms by 1975.

I had been programming small stand-alone and networked systems for microcomputers for a couple of years before I ever heard the term "personal computer".

And wasn't Microsoft named slightly differently back then, such as MicroSoft?

[Sysman]

Maybe I'll have to get one of these to wear at work now

Not too different to what I started working on which now looks like this.

I worked on machines that had this and knew folks who could enter programs using it. Some could key in a bootstrap from memory

[NickFitz]

NF, did you copy 'n' paste that paragraph from somewhere and forget the [ quote ] delimiters? There are so many inaccuracies in it that I don't think it is your words.

I really, really hate to question you, but I believe the term "personal computer" did not come along until some years later. And then it was a marketing term ("You need one because you are important"), not a technical term.

Also, the minicomputers had for some time eradicated the need for air-conditioned rooms by 1975.

I had been programming small stand-alone and networked systems for microcomputers for a couple of years before I ever heard the term "personal computer".

And wasn't Microsoft named slightly differently back then, such as MicroSoft?

I didn't say it was then known as a Personal Computer, just that it was the first machine of the type that became known as such (I still use the term "microcomputer" myself). Mainframes still lived in air-conditioned rooms (and probably still do), although I know minicomputers didn't because I was using one at the time. Still, that was the public's perception of computers in those days.

Microsoft was initially Micro-Soft, but I couldn't be bothered to drag in the history of the company name when they weren't the primary point.