The person who inspired Microsoft's birth dies

NEW YORK, USA: Ed Roberts, whose early Altair 8800 computer is said to have inspired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to start today’s IT giant Microsoft, died in Georgia on Thursday at the age of 68.

Though making of a PC is too complex to recognize one person alone in the industry, Roberts is called by some as "father of the personal computer",

The Altair is widely credited as the first personal computer and for helping inspire the modern computer industry, said a Cnet report.

According to Cnet, it was Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), a company co-founded by Roberts, that introduced the Altair in 1975. When an article on the Altair appeared in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, Allen noticed this and showed the story to Gates. And followed the saga of Microsoft, which had its first offices in Albuquerque, the location of Roberts’ office.

MITS’ dominance of the PC business was brief. By 1977, when the Apple II, Radio Shack TRS-80, and Commodore PET came out, the Altair already felt like a machine from an earlier era. Roberts left computing in the 1970s, selling MITS, going to medical school, and then setting up a medical practice in Georgia.

Gates and Allen paid tribute to Roberts. "Ed was truly a pioneer in the personal computer revolution, and didn't always get the recognition he deserved. He was an intense man with a great sense of humor, and he always cared deeply about the people who worked for him, including us," the Microsoft founders said in a statement.