Henry Edward Roberts was an American engineer, entrepreneur and medical doctor who invented the first commercially successful personal computer in 1974. He is most often known as “the father of the personal computer.”
Henry Edward Roberts was an American engineer, entrepreneur and medical doctor who invented the first commercially successful personal computer in 1974. He is most often known as “the father of the personal computer.”
Roberts was born in Miami, Florida to Henry Melvin Roberts, an appliance repairman, and Edna Wilcher Roberts, a homemaker.
Roberts became interested in electronics and built a small relay-based computer while in high school. Medicine was his true passion, however, and he entered University of Miami with the intention of becoming a doctor, the first in his family to attend college. There he met a neurosurgeon who shared his interest in electronics. The doctor suggested that Roberts get an engineering degree before applying to medical school, and Roberts changed his major to electrical engineering. Roberts earned an electrical engineering degree from Oklahoma State University in 1968 and was assigned to the Laser Division of the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
He founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in 1970 to sell electronics kits to model rocketry hobbyists, but the first successful product was an electronic calculator kit that was featured on the cover of the November 1971 issue of Popular Electronics. The calculators were very successful and sales topped one million dollars in 1973. A brutal calculator price war left the company deeply in debt by 1974.
Then he returned to computing kits and developed the world’s first general-purpose microcomputer and served as a mentor for industry magnates such as Gates and Allen. This was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, and hobbyists flooded MITS with orders for this $397 computer kit. Bill Gates and Paul Allen joined MITS to develop software and Altair BASIC was Microsoft’s first product. Roberts sold MITS in 1977 and retired to Georgia where he farmed, studied medicine and eventually became a small-town doctor living in Cochran, Georgia.
At the age of 41, Roberts went back to school to earn a medical degree. He then established a practice in Cochran, Ga., a community of about 4,500 people in central Georgia. Caniglia said Roberts used the same care and attention to detail as a physician as he had when he was an electrical engineer.
Roberts received the medal in 2002, and he was inducted into the OSU Alumni Association Hall of Fame in 2003.