Roberts, Mims, Cagle and another Air Force officer from the Lab, Bob Zaller, decided they could design and sell electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists. Manned space flight and the race to the moon in the 1960s made model rocketry a popular hobby. Transistorized tracking light for model rockets. Mims became a regular contributor to Model Rocketry. This led to an article in the September 1969 issue of Model Rocketry "Transistorized Tracking Light for Night Launched Model Rockets" by Captain Forrest Mims. Mims told him about a transistorized tracking light that he had used on night launches of rockets in Vietnam. Mims became an advisor to the Albuquerque Model Rocket Club and met the publisher of Model Rocketry magazine in July 1969. Later, Roberts and Stan Cagle, a civilian worker who also went to Oklahoma State, started building a power supply they hoped to sell. Roberts had reactivated Reliance Engineering and built an infrared intrusion alarm for his uncle's fish farm in Florida. ![]() Roberts and Mims were both assigned to the Lab's Laser Group in 1968. This caught the attention of an Air Force Colonel, who arranged for Mims to be assigned to the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB even though Mims lacked an engineering degree. Launching model rockets in an area accustomed to rocket attacks and working with blind children resulted in a story in the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. At Texas A&M, Mims developed an infrared obstacle-sensing device and he experimented with it at the Saigon School for Blind Boys and Girls. While serving in Vietnam as an intelligence officer, Mims continued his model rocket hobby. Mims graduated from Texas A&M University in 1966 (major in government with minors in English and history) then became a commissioned officer in the U.S. įorrest Mims was interested in science and electronics as a youth and even built an analog computer while in high school. Roberts earned an Electrical Engineering degree from Oklahoma State University in 1968 and was assigned to the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1965, he was selected for an Air Force program to complete his college degree, and became a commissioned officer. The most notable job was to create the electronics that animated the Christmas characters in the window display of Joske's department store in San Antonio. To augment his meager enlisted man's pay, Roberts worked on several off-duty projects and even set up a one-man company, Reliance Engineering. He soon became an electronics instructor at the Cryptographic Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Henry Edward Roberts studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Miami before enlisting in the U.S. ![]() Roberts retired to Georgia where he studied medicine and became a small town medical doctor. The operations were soon merged into the larger company and the MITS brand disappeared. MITS's annual sales had reached $6 million by 1977 when they were acquired by Pertec Computer. ![]() They moved to Albuquerque to work for MITS and in July 1975 started Microsoft. Paul Allen and Bill Gates saw the magazine and began writing software for the Altair, later called Altair BASIC. Hobbyists flooded MITS with orders for the $397 computer kit. Roberts then developed the first commercially successful microcomputer, the Altair 8800, which was featured on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics. A brutal calculator price war left the company deeply in debt by 1974. The calculators were very successful and sales topped one million dollars in 1973. In 1971, Roberts redirected the company into the electronic calculator market and the MITS 816 desktop calculator kit was featured on the November 1971 cover of Popular Electronics. Įd Roberts and Forrest Mims founded MITS in December 1969 to produce miniaturized telemetry modules for model rockets such as a roll rate sensor. Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems ( MITS) was an American electronics company founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico that began manufacturing electronic calculators in 1971 and personal computers in 1975.
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