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Dr. Roberts, whose build-it-yourself kit concentrated thousands of dollars wort... h of computer capability in an affordable package, inspired Gates and childhood friend Paul Allen to come up with Microsoft in 1975, after they saw an article about the MITS Altair 8800 personal computer in Popular Electronics.

"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," Gates and Allen said in a joint statement. "The day our first untested software worked on his Altair was the start of a lot of great things."

The man often credited with kick-starting the modern computer era never intended to lead a revolution.

Henry Edward Roberts was born in Miami, spent time in the Air Force and received an electrical engineering degree from Oklahoma State University in 1968. He later parlayed his interest in technology into a business making calculators. When large companies such as Texas Instruments began cornering the business, Dr. Roberts began to turn to computers, which at the time were hulking machines available almost exclusively at universities.

"He came up with the idea that you could have one of these computers on your own," his son David Roberts said, adding that his father expected to sell a few units. "Basically, he did it to try to get out of debt."

David Roberts described his father as a tinkerer who surveyed his friends before building his personal computer. The Altair was nothing like the ultra-slim laptops of today. Operated by switches and with no display screen, it looked like little more than a metal box covered in blinking red lights.

"My assumption was that there were a bunch of nuts out there like me that would like to have a computer," Dr. Roberts told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1997. "To engineers and electronics people, it's the ultimate gadget."

Dr. Roberts founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, which sold the kits. A young Gates and Allen later founded their fledgling Microsoft firm in Albuquerque, where MITS was based.

Dr. Roberts sold his company in 1977 and retired to a life of vegetable farming in rural Georgia before going to medical school and getting a medical degree from Georgia's Mercer University in 1986. He worked as an internist, seeing as many as 30 patients a day, his son said.

But Dr. Roberts never lost his interest in modern technology, even asking about Apple's highly anticipated iPad from his sick bed.