The “father of the personal computer” who is even recognized for giving kick up to the career of Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the legendary Dr Henry Edward Robert died at the age of 68 on April 1st 2010 after a long bout of pneumonia. He was the inventor of the Altair 8800, a machine that started the personal and home loan era. Gates and Allen contacted Dr Roberts after viewing machine on the front cover of a magazine and proposed the doctor to write software on for the machine. And that first program named Altair Basic is known as to be the foundation of Microsoft’s business.

“Ed was willing to take a chance on us - two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace - and we have always been grateful to him,” the Microsoft founders said in a statement. “The day our first untested software worked on his Altair was the start of a lot of great things.” Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak also told in a media statement that Dr Roberts had taken “a critically important step that led to everything we have today”.

Dr Roberts was the founder of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), a unit as founded to sell out electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists. But soon was facing some stiffer competition. Facing dept he started making computer kits and its result was Altair 8800, a machine operated with switches without any display. It took its name from the then-cutting edge Intel 8080 microprocessor.

And people interested in machine started contacting and one of the interested parties were Paul Allen and Bill Gates and offered to write software code as to program the machine. From their both moved to Albuquerque-the home of MITS and there they founded MicroSoft and their software BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). “We will always have many fond memories of working with Ed in Albuquerque, in the MITS office right on Route 66 - where so many exciting things happened that none of us could have imagined back then,” the pair told. He sold his company in 1977.