Not many people in the computer world remembered H. Edward Roberts, not after he walked away from the industry more than three decades ago to become a country doctor in Georgia. Bill Gates remembered him, though: http://goo.gl/fE6iAs Dr. Roberts lay dying last week in a hospital in Macon, Ga., suffering from pneumonia, Mr. Gates flew down to be at his bedside.
Mr. Gates knew what many had forgotten: that Dr. Roberts had made an early and enduring contribution to modern computing.
Mr. Gates dropped out of Harvard, and Mr. Allen left his job at Honeywell in Boston. The product they created for Dr. Roberts’s machine, Microsoft Basic, was the beginning of what would become the world’s largest software company and would make its founders billionaires many times over.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computers)
Total share: 30 years of personal computer market share figures
Google Books
Total share: 30 years of personal computer market share figures
Google Books
Image source: Dr. Henry Edward "Ed" Roberts (1941-2010) in his office in 2002. Wikipedia, Attribution: Spencer Smith, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
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