Proto-PC Inventor Henry Edward (Ed) Roberts, Inspiration for Microsoft, 1941-2010

The torch-passing symbolism is nearly impossible to ignore: The very day a revolutionary new device, the iPad, hit the media, the inventor of another revolutionary computer has died. 

Ed Roberts is perhaps best known as the developer of the MITS Altair 8800 in 1975, a device which is widely credited for having sparked the revolution in personal computing. The Altair 8800 was a build-it-yourself hobbyist kit consisting of switches, with no display, and MITS had little faith that they'd sell...