Henry Edward Roberts (September 13, 1941 – April 1, 2010) was an American engineer, entrepreneur and medical doctor who invented the first commercially successful personal computer in 1974.

This was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, and hobbyists flooded MITS with orders for this $397 computer kit.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen joined MITS to develop software and Altair BASIC was Microsoft's first product.

During World War II, while his father was in the Army, Roberts and his mother lived on the Wilcher family farm in Wheeler County, Georgia.

Medicine was his true passion, however, and he entered the University of Miami with the intention of becoming a doctor, the first in his family to attend college.

[7][9] After basic training, Roberts attended the Cryptographic Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

To augment his meager enlisted man's pay, Roberts worked on several off-duty projects and even set up a one-man company, Reliance Engineering.

The most notable job was to create the electronics that animated the Christmas characters in the window display of Joske's department store in San Antonio.

Roberts earned an electrical engineering degree from Oklahoma State University in 1968 and was assigned to the Laser Division of the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

[11] Roberts, Mims, and lab coworkers Stan Cagle and Bob Zaller decided that they could design and sell electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists.

[13] They advertised the light flasher, a roll rate sensor with transmitter, and other kits in Model Rocketry, but the sales were disappointing.

Mims wrote an article about the new technology of light-emitting diodes that was to be published in the November 1970 issue of Popular Electronics magazine.

Roberts and Mims developed an LED communicator that would transmit voice on an infrared beam of light to a receiver hundreds of feet away.

Roberts had always wanted to build a digital computer and, in July 1970, Electronic Arrays announced a set of six LSI integrated circuits that would make a four-function calculator.

[17][18] Roberts was determined to design a calculator kit and got fellow Weapons Laboratory officers William Yates and Ed Laughlin to invest in the project with time and money.

[21] The functionality of calculator integrated circuits increased at a rapid pace and Roberts was designing and producing new models.

In April 1974, Intel released the 8080 microprocessor that Roberts felt was powerful enough for his computer kit, but each 8080 chip sold for $360 in small quantities.

Roberts assured Solomon that the project would be complete by November to meet the press deadline for the January 1975 issue.

MITS technical writer David Bunnell came up with three pages of possible names, but Roberts was too busy finishing the computer design to choose one.

At the first Altair Computer Convention (March 1976), Les Solomon told the audience that the name was inspired by his 12-year-old daughter Lauren.

"[7][28] The December 1976 issue of Popular Science misquoted this account, giving credit to Ed Roberts' daughter.

The April 1975 issue of the MITS newsletter Computer Notes had a page-long price list that offered over 15 optional boards.

By July, new companies such as Processor Technology were selling 4K Static RAM boards with the promise of reliable operation.

[36] Bill Gates was a student at Harvard University and Paul Allen worked for Honeywell in Boston when they saw the Altair computer on the cover of Popular Electronics.

Allen modified the DEC Macro Assembler to produce code for the Intel 8080 and wrote a program to emulate the 8080 so they could test their BASIC without having an Altair computer.

Using DEC's BASIC-PLUS language as a guide, Gates determined what features would work with the limited resources of the Altair computer.

[38] The next day, the Altair with 7 kB had passed its memory test, and the BASIC interpreter was on a paper tape Bill Gates had created just before Allen left Boston.

[49] In late 1977 Roberts returned to rural Georgia and bought a large farm in Wheeler County where he had often visited his grandparents' home in his youth.

He was nominated by Mercer alumnus Guy Foulkes, MD based on Roberts’ dual accomplishment of developer of the first personal computer and his devotion to rural medicine.

[55][56] His sister, Cheryl R Roberts (b. November 13, 1947 – d. March 6, 2010), of nearby Dublin, Georgia, died at age 62, a few weeks before his death.