RIP - H. Edward Roberts - PC Pioneer

[Ron Whitfield]

Paul Allen and Bill Gates used his creation to launch a new world - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/bu...03roberts.html

[craigwatanabe]

Re: RIP - H. Edward Roberts - PC Pioneer

Interesting, that photo shows him resting on an LSI dumb terminal hooked up to an Altair 8800. At about that time Popular Electronics came out with a project utilizing an 8-bit 1802 Processor. You could ultimately program it with Basic-A using an ASCII decoder and a teletype keyboard.

The project was the Cosmac Elf and two of us built one as a summer electronics project in 1976. At first the display consisted of four LED's then we added on a Binary to Decimal decoder and produced an 8-segment numerical display. Using the cascade function of the decoder, we were able to display multiple digits. Adding a hexidecimal decoder we expanded it to 16 digits (0-9, A-F) and built our own keyboard consisting of 16 momentary pushbuttons. Then the Binary to ASCII decoder came out and we attached a teletype keyboard to produce the full-range of the alphabits for Basic-A machine language programming.

Using an ASCII to Video display modulator the Cosmac Elf became a functional PC about the same time the Altair 8800 became available as a kit.

IBM-DOS, MS-DOS, Apple-DOS and CompaqA all came out sometime in those mid 70's. Those were interesting times with the advent of personal computers.