I also remember the problems with MITS’s badly designed 4KB dynamic RAM cards, which were so notorious that they gave DRAM a bad reputation (at least in the home computer market) for years thereafter. They were flaky, quirky, temperamental beasts, and eventually we gave up on them. We had three of the machines, but never managed to get more than one working at the same time–and sometimes not even one would work reliably. Greg wrote, “Many of the designs show signs of inspiration but usually were hampered by silly errors.” As a former MITS customer, I can attest to that.īack in 1976 I worked in a Princeton University lab where we were attempting to use Altair 8800s to control experimental apparatus.
#Lol i dunno ascii professional#
And that’s not sad in any way, because Ed Roberts got to have two careers, two professional adventures, and did a great job with both. He was two half-lives (75 percent depleted) into his digital career. Suddenly Ed leaving Albuquerque with a pocketful of money makes a lot of sense. Think back a couple columns to that discussion of engineers and their half-lives. Linux might have called him back but by the time it was available Ed wasn’t.
#Lol i dunno ascii windows#
And an Apple II (worse still a Macintosh or even a Windows box) was, therefore, his nemesis. Ed’s was the era of ascii terminal computing. So it isn’t that he lost his touch for technology. Twenty years into his medical career Ed could still program his Altairs in assembler. And every one of those was running some medical or back-office application connected to a terminal. In addition to Altairs with 8080 processors there were 8088’s, 8086’s, and even Motorola 68000’s. More than two decades past the height of his success, Roberts was still using he same hardware and using it well. It was an amazing experience to visit Ed’s medical practice, which was run with the help of many computers - MiTS computers. It was a recognition that even in 1978 Ed Roberts was being left behind by computing.
It was Ed cashing-in to some degree and assuring the financial health of his family. In one sense this could be seen as a logical transition from a dodgy electronic kit company that had almost gone under many times.
That transition from digital hardware to medicine is key to Ed’s story and I think provides the crux of this column, which is just one of probably dozens of published remembrances of the man.Įd sold MiTS and started medical school less than three years after introducing the Altair 8800. I never worked for or with him but I met him many times even years after he gave up computers for medicine in his late 30’s. Where, again, are all those French computer companies? I say the American personal computer because French readers constantly correct me on this. He was the founder of MiTS, the designer of the Altair 8800 and as close to being the father of the American personal computer as anyone can get.
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