Henry Roberts, credited with building the first personal computer and a mentor to Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, has died of pneumonia at the age of 68.
Roberts was one of the pioneers of the PC in the 1970s, having built the Altair 8800 in 1975 which featured on the cover of Popular Electronics. Gates and Allen then sold software for the computer after they founded Microsoft.
“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 company’s blog. “The day our first untested software worked on his Altair was the start of a lot of great things.”
Roberts, who sold the Altair through Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, later studied medicine and became a doctor in the southern United States.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
