Ed Roberts created the personal computer industry (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Ed Roberts created the personal computer industry (2023)

every.to

76 pointsrbanffy45 comments

I don't know how many HN folk are familiar with the Altair 8800 and how primitive the basic machine was. No keyboard or display - just a box with a control panel with blinken lights and binary toggle switches to enter data.

The basic machine didn't even have a boot ROM, or an operating system, so you would enter your boot code one byte at a time by using those toggle switches. A common add-on device to boot from would be a paper tape reader - e.g. with Microsoft BASIC on it.

Here's a video of someone entering boot code.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zbtNImG2NE

This series is great.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB3mwSROoJ4KLWM8KwK0cD1dh...

Thinking about this MVP, I wonder if in another 50 years people will describe products like the AI pin that MKBHD panned in the same way.

EDIT: "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now"

https://youtu.be/TitZV6k8zfA

I'd guess people will look back at wearable AI devices the same we look back on wristwatch TVs and calculators. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

I'm guessing in 50 years we'll still only be carrying one electronic device around - basically a smartphone.

Yes, in its most basic configuration, it is essentially a microprocessor trainer! The only I/O you had was a set of 8 "sense switches," which were a byte-wide input port, and those were shared with the upper 8 address bits. Someone eventually figured out routines that make use of nonexistent memory in the base configuration to use the upper address lights as a "display," by writing loops that accessed those areas frequently enough to make the LEDs look illuminated due to persistence of vision. That, with the sense switch inputs, was used to put together a "Kill the Bit" game!

There was another "output device" discovered in the basic configuration: RF interference! Someone was listening to an AM radio while hacking on their Altair, and noticed in some parts of the program they'd get a ZIIIIIP! sort of noise out of the radio, when the cover was off. This was hacked on and expanded into a tune-playing program! Naturally, one of the first songs the Altair was taught to "sing" was "Bicycle Built for Two" ("Daisy"). Here's a video of a friend of mine's Altair running the music program:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tImrHlYLzZo

He'd brought his recently-acquired Altair 8800 over to our house to get it running, since I had a lot of other S-100 stuff going. The terminal to the left of it was running a ROM monitor on a Dajen SCI board, described here:

http://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2011/11/03/dajen-sci

...after painstakingly toggling in the music program through the front panel, we used the Dajen board to burn the program into a 2708 1K x 8 EPROM so we wouldn't have to do it again!

Wow! That Daisy rendition sounds great! It reminds me of my DECTalk which does a great version too!

>the Altair 8800 and how primitive the basic machine was. No keyboard or display - just a box with a control panel with blinken lights and binary toggle switches to enter data

just to be clear, at the very same time in history, the PDP-10 was a very large computer and cost orders of magnitude more, and pretty much looked the same

https://hackaday.com/2014/10/28/restoring-a-pdp-10-console-p...

You could easily automatically boot either of these computers (without having to enter the code through switches) by putting a ROM at bootup address that had the same code in it. That's still how computers work today.

They only gave you the switches because it wasn't established yet that everybody would want to put the same code in.

and the large IBM 360 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS-WtjwAAO0 and the followon IBM 370 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLnvvOoWnzU&t=41s

the amazing thing about the Altair 8800 (intel 8080) was that simply, for the first time, you could have these same blinken lights at home and do all the mittengrabbin and gefingerpokin you want to https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/blinkenlights.htm...

within a very short time (same timeframe) the SWTPC 6800 (motorola 6800) came out and it chose not to have the lights and switches, it booted into a little debugger which was simplistic but would let you accomplish the same thing of entering in the code you really wanted. It required a terminal though, which raised the cost of entry. https://deramp.com/swtpc.html

The only reason we don't get the lights and switches any more is that they think we don't want them. But you and I know we do, so upvote this comment to record shattering levels and I'll share it with Apple and Dell and we'll get our real computing platform back again! Also, post your code for a good adblocker we can enter through the front panel.

I saw the Altair 8800 on the cover of BYTE magazine in a newsstand in LA as a child and begged my grandparents for a copy. Reading that magazine changed my life and started my journey into programming.

The January 1977 issue: <https://www.digibarn.com/collections/mags/byte-covers/BYTE-1...>

I was 9. I'll never forget it. Taught myself programming that year entirely from library books.

I am a HUGE fan of the book "Fire In The Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer."

I am an elder-millennial and it filled in a lot of gaps in the history of personal computing that I was too young to learn.

Link: https://amzn.to/40vlUkN

You might like The Dream Machine then, too!

Also Hackers by Stephen Levy.

It's old but along the same lines; more stories of industry pioneers: Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date (1992, 1996).

I also recommend Stan Veit's book; it's full of anecdotes from the early years of computer hardware and there's a podcast that reads some of the chapters aloud: https://www.classiccomputing.com/CCPodcasts/Stan_Veit/Stan_V...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

> It was the first commercially successful personal computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computer_engineer)

> He is most often known as "the father of the personal computer."

(This looks like a good article/story that is not found on Wikipedia; just sharing these links for anyone who wants an overview / know what it is about, before diving into the story.)

Wow, the price list at the bottom of that Altair article: $439 for the computer (in kit form), $262 for the 4K word memory board, $124 for the serial teletype board, and $1500 for the teletype terminal. The terminal is twice as much as the rest put together!

Musical tribute: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/a_sign_o...

As sung by Frank Hayes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMS6G83NqFQ

Right, but bear in mind that the "terminal" here is a teletype - basically a printer with a keyboard, as shown in the picture.

If you wanted a cheaper keyboard + display option, there was always Don Lancaster's "TV Typewriter" kit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter

Furthermore, the Teletype was also your storage device, if you bought the Model 33 ASR. It had both a paper tape punch and a reader. For $1500 you got not only your hardcopy console terminal, but at the time the most compatible way to load and store programs and data!

There's a nice video here of a complete BASIC boot sequence - entering boot code, loading BASIC, then loading a BASIC program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5b1Xowxdk

As far as any program was concerned the TTY was just a serial port, and it couldn't tell the whether data coming in was from keyboard or paper tape reader.

Yup, that's why they were such useful devices! Even if you were ending up with inefficient storage (punching ASCII vs. binary, or expanded BASIC source vs. tokens), it was built-in.

The package was lost in the mail? Or did he not actually finish the computer on time and this was a dog ate the homework type excuse? Depends on the degree to which he was a hustler I guess.

It's pretty obvious from the accounts of the partners he worked with that he was a straight forward guy who did the opposite of what you suggest. If you read the story, he got a detail wrong, it wasn't due to an immediate bankruptcy of the railway, but a strike that eventually let to the bankruptcy of the railway operator. In any case, the computer did not get to its destination in time. We don't know if it ever got there or not as it had become irrelevant to the story.

When your company is running out of money and this is the only thing that can save you, you may do desperate things.

The reason it stood out was that he was flying himself to the meeting, so why did he ship the package separately if it was so important?

Anyhow it is unprovable so we can go with his reputation.

His history shows that he did not compromise his integrity to gain a momentary advantage, so I doubt he'd have succumbed in that instance. He understood those things have a tendency to backfire. It's a different world now. That was towards the end of the era where deals could be done with a handshake.

> The reason it stood out was that he was flying himself to the meeting, so why did he ship the package separately if it was so important?

It wasn't an iPhone you can just stick in your pocket. The thing weighed almost 150 lbs and looked something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

I wouldn't want to be seen in an airport with the 3 other people you'd need carrying that thing around.

Funny story about that. The folks who build the Amiga prototype didn't want to take any chances shipping it to CES, or putting it in checked luggage. So they bought their computer its own seat on the airplane with them:

http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/pillow.html

It's not 150 LBS, even fully kitted out (which wasn't possible at the time!), but it definitely didn't fit in the luggage compartment. The first portable to do that was the Osborne :P

Nit: Railway Express Agency was intimately connected with railroad infrastructure, but it was not actually a railway. It was, essentially, FedEx, only using railways for transport instead of their own planes.

Or: why I still drive to a lot of customer on-site visits, so I can take the hardware with me personally.

I'd suggest reading the history of Digital Research, Inc. and Gary Kildall to get a more rounded perspective on this story.

Important point not really expanded upon in the article: Roger Melen was one of the founders of Cromemco, a very successful microcomputer company that started with S-100 products!

(2023)

Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38680698

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Ed Roberts: The Secret Father of Modern Computing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38680698 - Dec 2023 (37 comments)

Interview with the "Father of the PC" Ed Roberts in the early 2000's [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38655639 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)

Why Gates is richer than Allen - an Ed Roberts story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1246540 - April 2010 (1 comment)

Altair developer Ed Roberts dies in Ga. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1235671 - April 2010 (13 comments)

Forrest Mims mentioned in the article was recently featured in an HN submission.

Every appearance of the word "Kirkland" here should be "Kirtland." We're talking about the Air Force base in Albuquerque, not Costco.

TIL after hearing the name a gazillion times that it's actually spelled with a "t". Apparently I am not alone...

Not hardly!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-glottalization

I am fortunate to have smart friends who introduced me to this not even a month ago.

Maybe Roberts and the Altair are becoming obscure to younger people, but in the traditional story of the personal computer neither he nor the Altair were "secret" or obscure. As the article mentions, Microsoft was founded by Gates and Allen to sell a BASIC interpreter for the Altair.

Yes, that's pretty bad linkbait. We've replaced the title with the subtitle above.

> The media at the time was talking excitedly about the launch of Microsoft Windows Vista and the new MacBook Pro.

Wouldn't Windows 7 have been the latest Windows at the time, or is this a joke calling Windows 7 just another version of Vista?

Wasn't Windows 7 a rebranding of Vista with some improvements, maybe just lipstick on a pig but still, I really don't know.

I do know I liked Win 7 way better than Vista.

"some improvements" is one of the best understatements.

It certainly was more than cosmetic, more like a complete makeover after incarceration in a health and wellness camp for a year

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