I am sure Wirt would have recognized the name.

An electrical engineer, Roberts got his start 
building the electronics for a heart-lung machine (his early ambition 
was to be a doctor). At one of his first jobs, he came face to face with
 a room-sized IBM computer, which "opened up a whole new world" for him,
 he said. "And I began thinking, What if you gave everyone a computer?" 
He turned his skills into making calculator kits, which he sold from his
 company, MITS, in Albuquerque, N.M. When calculator sales petered out 
in the early 1970s, Roberts designed the first successful personal 
computer, the MITS Altair, which he sold as a $439 kit, figuring 
hobbyists would enjoy doing the actual assembly. The so-called 
microcomputer was featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in
 January 1975 (pictured below), inspiring a revolution by nerdy types --
 like Bill Gates (who quit Harvard and moved to Albuquerque to work with
 Roberts, since he and buddy Paul Allen had written a BASIC programming 
language for the Altair. The duo called their new company "Micro-Soft".)

Many industry historians consider 
Roberts "the father of the personal computer". Roberts figured he'd need
 to sell 200 kits to break even. By May of 1975, MITS (Micro 
Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) had sold 2,500; by August, more 
than 5,000. By October he had 90 employees. By 1977 Roberts sold the 
company and walked away from the business, using his millions to go to 
medical school and become a country doctor, practicing in Cochran, 
Georgia. When he became ill, Bill Gates flew to be with him. Roberts 
died in Georgia April 1 from pneumonia. He was 68.

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