Honoring the Father of the PC

It must have been amazing for him to see where his invention has lead to. May he rest in PC.

Bill Gates did not write the original code. He purchased it from Digital.

What Bill Gates & Paul Allen wrote for the MITS Altair computer was a version of BASIC language that ran on the intel 8080 computer chip.

"Founder" got it wrong on several counts. The later product, Microsoft's MS DOS, was originally bought by Gates & Allen from a young man who had a company called Seattle Computers (or something similar). It was later said that it was a re-write of Gary Kildall's CP-M operating system. The story goes that IBM had tried to meet with Kildall about an operating system for their new personal computer but Kildall was too busy to meet with them. They then went to Gates & Allen, who told them they could supply an operating system, which they bought from Seattle Computers and revised and renamed as MS-DOS.

Most of this is quite well documented. I may be off on a point or two, but not by much. I do want to emphasize that the idea that MS-DOS was a re-write of CP-M is a rumor that I believe but can in no way confirm.

But, the column was to honor the passing of a man few know about but who has had a huge effect on the world we live int. Thank you Mr. Roberts.

Gates & Allen were not,
and in my opinion anyway,
(Microsoft) have never really been innovators,
in the sense of new technologies.

They started at the time,
and still do run a great business though

Due respect to Gates & Allen.
They recognize the actual innovation of Roberts.

Roberts was the (an) innovator.

It seems history is often biased towards
the commercial success achieved
and not the actual innovation.

I guess I would just hope that
in the broader sense that all recognize
that Roberts innovated and Gates & Allen
capitalized.

I agree. Monetary success, sometimes obtained at the expense of ethics, seems to distort history. Roberts was a true creator, as was Kildall. I'm not sure what Gates is but I wish MS would release a version of Windows that works. Twenty years on this treadmill is way too long to wait for a bug-free operating system. Then again, maybe it's more profitable to sell a malfunctioning product when you can then sell the fix for it. Wikipedia has a nice page on Ed Roberts and Gary Kildall. The Kildall page elaborates on the IBM/Kildall/Gates scenario regarding PC-DOS.

www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computer_engineer)

www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

Two professors from Dartmouth apparently wrote the original BASIC code. Gates and Allen modded it for the Altair.
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

classicq, well said.

Father of the PC ???

Poland, Anno Domini 1973, Jacek Karpinski:

Minicomputers K-202 performed one million operations per second ...

-> pl_wikipedia_org

Sorry to come late to the party!

Ed Roberts sold MITS and went back to school to become a medical doctor. I seem to recall an interview with Ed from, maybe, the mid-80's, where he said that he left computers to do something important.
In the same interview, he stated that the S-100 bus should have been called the Altair bus because he designed and implemented it. That bus, I believe, is still in use in industrial computer applications.

Ed Roberts sold MITS and went back to school to become a medical doctor. I seem to recall an interview with Ed from, maybe, the mid-80's, where he said that he left computers to do something important.