He brought us the Altair

RIP Ed Roberts, who changed the world.

I remember when the January 1975 Popular Electronics came out; I stared at the cover with the picture of the Altair 8800, dreaming the dreams of countless geeks who saw the future. It wasn't only me; legend has it that Bill Gates had the same thoughts, and realized that holy shit, it's going to open a huge market for software (and Bill didn't do too bad).

Like thousands of others, I sent in my order. And waited... I finally received it in May, and it took a lot of work to get it to run (they made some pretty funky hardware decisions). It was never a high performance box (a whopping 256 bytes of memory), and you had to enter programs through front panel switches. But it was mine, which was pretty amazing; individuals just didn't own computers in those days.

It never worked well, and was frustrating to use. But it was extremely inspirational, and was the start of the modern computer era. It launched thousands of hardware and software companies. And it inspired me to go beyond hardware tinkering to figure out some useful things that a PC could do. I soon moved on to the more stable IMSAI, then the 6502 and other more advanced chips, but hung on to that Altair for many years. It was always an ispiration.

So thanks, Ed; you did a great thing.