A man who probably very few people have heard of, Dr. Henry Roberts, can be considered the inventor of the personal computer. In 1975, his company, MITS, put on sale the Altair 8800, the world's first personal computer. Two young computer enthusiasts, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, wrote a BASIC interpreter for the machine, and thus was Microsoft born.
The BBC News web site says:
Quote:
The "father of the personal computer" who kick-started the careers of Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen has died at the age of 68.
Dr Henry Edward Roberts was the inventor of the Altair 8800, a machine that sparked the home computer era.
Gates and Allen contacted Dr Roberts after seeing the machine on the front cover of a magazine and offered to write software for it.
The program was known as Altair-Basic, the foundation of Microsoft's business.
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