Guntown cemetery may hold well-kept secret

The following article appeared in the Tupelo Daily Journal a few years ago. The author is the late Journal Feature Editor Phyllis Harper. It provides the starting point for my suspicion that the body of my distant relative, John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, lies hidden in a remote family cemetery near my birthplace in Tupelo. This premise will be contained in an upcoming article, still under development. Guntown is an old, small town north of Tupelo. Many family members, including my mother, were born there. Mother taught school in Guntown many, many years ago.

By Phyllis Harper

Go to Guntown, drive through the small pleasant town with old oaks and magnolias lining it streets. It is quiet, sleepy, especially on a cloudy autumn afternoon. Chances are you will come away thinking that nothing exciting happens here, indeed that noting has ever happened worthy of note. Chances are you may be wrong. One of the greatest dramas of all times may have played out in Guntown more than a century ago. Some believe John Wilkes Booth escaped and lived in hiding at the home of Dr. John Fletcher Booth in Guntown. Some say Lincoln’s assassin is buried in an unmarked grave between Dr. John Fletcher Booth and Dr. George Washington Booth, brothers and prominent physicians and landowners before the Civil War. (Dick Gentry’s grandfather was George Washington Booth Smith, who died in 1922).

An oval gold cuff link engraved “J.W.B.” is the latest clue in this mystery, and conjecture is that a matching link may be in that unmarked grave. John Wilkes Bolth would have been a cousin to the Guntown Booths, perhaps something of a hero in the South in those times, thought not all Southers condoned the killing of President Abraham Lincoln. No one has ever questioned that Booth shot Lincoln that April evening in 1865 as the president watched a performance in Ford’s Theater in Washington. But serious historians have questioned that the body brought out of the burning barn in Virginia was that of John Wilkes Booth, and several have written books offering rather strong evidence that it could not have been.

Stories, aprocryphal some said, survived among Guntown residents, but no one paid much attention. The Guntown brothers were large landholders, wealthier than most, clannish, perhaps a bit strange to their neighbors. The stories, however, continued to surface. Years ago, I met Mrs. Emma Epting Pressey who was known as “Miss Em” and lived monst of her life in Guntown. Granddaughter of Dr. John Fletcher Booth, she told stories handed down from her mother, Jenney Booth Epting, about a mysterious “uncle” who lived upstares in the Booth home.

Children in the family were told not to talk about him to outsiders. This uncle seldom came downstairs only at night. He walked with a limp. He was learned in the classics. One link in a chain of circumstantial evidence comes from Dr. Forrest Tutor, owner of Lochinvar, an antebellum mansion in Pontotoc County built by the Gordon family. Dr. Tutor has a collection of papers and letters left by Col. James Gordon, who met Booth in Canada near the end of the war. Despite being some distance apart, as wealthy landowners the Pontotoc Gordons and the Guntown Booths in those times would more than likely have been friends.

Gordon’s writing implied that he and John Wilkes Booth and others, “desperate men” he termed them, planned to kidnap Lincoln and hold him for political ransom. Gordon siad Booth “and other hotheads jumped the gun and carried out the assassination.” Gordon was questioned afterward, but proved to the Union forces’ satisfaction that he was not involved. Miss Em once told me it was all conjecture, and only the Good Lord will ever know for sure,” which may be true. But with the advent of interest in genealogical research, Booth cousins – some several times removed – began to meet and compare notes. Last year Charles Booth, active in the Itawamba (County) Historical Society, took me to the gravesite he believes to be that of his distant cousin John Wilkes. A subsequent picture and story in the Daily Journal reached the hands of Louis Parks in Ocala, Fla.

I got a letter from Parks last week, saying that as a child he overheard his grandmother discussing with her brother, Bernard Hess Booth, a collar button engraved J.W.B that came from the Booth house in Guntown. Parks recalled that in his youth children “were seen and not heard. And, Grandmother was a Booth, which means brilliant and high-strung. With those people, I suppose I sensed, one doesn’t ask prying questions. Grandmother loved her grandchildren, but they stayed in their place, according to proper decorum.”

Parks learned that his cousin, Dr. Bruce R. Parks Jr. of Jackson, had the engraved object in his possession, and wanted to see it. He expected “the item probably had fancy, script engraving and stated ‘J.F.B’. ( J.W.B.). On a recent trip to visit his cousin, he saw the “gold oval-shaped cufflink. The engraving is plainly, J.W.B. I am now wondering whether the body in the unmarked grave at Guntown might not be buried with the mate.”

I wonder, too. Some historians get defensive about the original story of Booth’s death being the true version, and they may be right. The old Booth home in Guntown is gone, burned years ago. If Booth is buried in Guntown, the old cemetery holds a well-kept secret.

Dick Gentry at the possible burial site of John Wilkes Booth in a remote family cemetery in Guntown, MS

 

Written in 2001 for an Internet magazine

©Dick Gentry

The Man Who Should Be King

(A five-part series about the-man-you-never-heard-of who invented the personal computer)

It took about three weeks to get an appointment with Ed Roberts, M.D. If I had complained about a sore throat, fainting spells, or had cracked one of my aging bones, I might have gotten there sooner. But I told his receptionist over the phone I wanted to talk about personal computers, and I was a journalist. She said she would pass it on, and I waited. For days. I called again, and waited. Days.

In the back of my head, I wondered if he really was the man I had once read about. Let’s face it: The man who invented the personal computer out in New Mexico more than 20 years ago is now a general practitioner in Cochran, Georgia? Peanut country? Next to those acres and acres of Vidalia onions? Was there even such a person? He has given a few interviews, but has generally stayed in the shadows as the digital age unfolded.

Then, mid-afternoon one recent Friday, the telephone rang.

“Mr. Gentry, this is Ed Roberts. You called my office?”

Immediately, I was tongue-tied and stammering like a cub on his first reporting assignment. But, five days later I was southbound out of Atlanta headed for Cochran, a hamlet of about 4,500 people near Macon, and a lunch appointment with the man himself.

His office is across the street from Bleckley County Memorial Hospital, where he is chief of staff. It’s a small, unpretentious, one-story, cement-block building, with his name on a sign that includes: “Adult Internal Medicine.” He had finished morning rounds and receiving patients, and there was no one else in the waiting room. The receptionist ushered me down a hallway to an office in the rear.

I was curious about who I would find: A cerebral little nerd? Too meek to speak? He was waiting behind a desk cluttered with magazines and assorted scraps of paper. The walls were decorated with plaques and degrees, and there were bookcases, cabinets and shelves. Behind his desk, I saw a few computers stacked atop one another in a corner. I recognized one as the Altair 8800 microcomputer, the machine that this interview was all about. Was it the original? I didn’t ask but I wondered: Doesn’t that belong in a museum?

The dark-haired, 59-year-old man sitting behind the desk was huge. A friendly, bulky bear in a white medical frock, looking at me not unkindly through normal, non-nerdy lenses.

He had told me briefly over the telephone there was some history that he wanted to straighten out about who had really invented the personal computer, and he immediately launched into the subject:

“Apple got bolder and bolder with their ads and that really pissed me off,” he grumbled. “By the time they got into it, we had installed over 50,000 machines and had dealers all over the world. MITS was a well-established company before Apple ever shipped its first kit. That was another thing they tried to do: They said MITS was shipping kits and they were shipping assembled units. The fact is all the initial Altairs were assembled units and almost all the ones that were actually sold were assembled units, and all the initial Apples were actually kits—partial kits at that, not even complete kits. They just tried to rewrite history, and that’s been a little frustrating. What they did invent was wonderful, but they did not invent the first computer nor did they invent the industry. Pick any subject about PCs and it was done at MITS first—dealerships, hard disks, floppy disks, use of dynamic memory, use of static memory, languages. All that was done at MITS.”

So much for my concern about the good doctor’s reticence.

MITS? That was Micro (changed from the original Model) Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, a company Roberts started in Albuquerque with three other friends in 1968. Roberts and two others were in the U.S. Air Force, and the fourth was a civilian engineer.

“We built model rocket telemetry equipment for hobbyists,” he said. “We never made much money, but we learned a lot about dealing with the public and making kits and things. I had been interested in computers since high school.”

When not working with his models, Roberts tinkered with a calculator he created using small- to medium-scale integrated circuits. Before long, he had invented an actual working model.

“My partners didn’t see any market for small calculators, so they bailed and I bought them out for a couple of thousand dollars,” he said.

By this time, MITS was incorporated and he wanted to get his calculator into production. He turned toward the wall behind his desk and pointed to a small, greenish, metallic-looking machine about the size of a shoe box sitting on top of the Altair 8800.

“That was on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine in 1971,” he said. “That’s the first low-cost, electronic calculator built in the United States.”

He turned and began searching through a stack of magazines behind his desk.

“They (Popular Electronics) sent me the galley proof of it for a keepsake, and I’ve got it here someplace,” he said before abandoning the search.

“That machine was probably even the first personal computer,” he added as an afterthought, “although no one seems to have picked up on that. It had a programmable interface that you could add to. You could write programs with it and use it as a computer, albeit a simple-minded one. But that machine was the first LSI (large-scale integrated circuit) calculator in the U.S. The real one (production model) looked better than that one, and we did real well for about a year. You remember the 1970s? The world suddenly exploded with calculators. The chips got more and more simple to interface.

“It wasn’t something just anybody could do, but within a year or so the LSI had progressed so far that all you needed was a garage and a soldering iron and you could build and manufacture calculators.”

The competition almost killed MITS, he said. In 1974, Roberts’ accountant came to him with a plea to close. But Roberts hung on. Popular Science was about to feature his newest product on its January 1975 cover—the Altair 8800 minicomputer. He coaxed his banker into a $65,000 loan to keep the doors open on the strength of potential sales the publicity would bring. When the banker asked him how many he thought he would sell, Roberts gave him the highly optimistic number of 800.

“We couldn’t find a single person who thought it was a good idea,” he said. “The article came out in December, and in January we had days when we sold 250 machines,” Roberts said. “We went from a bankrupt company to where we had half a million dollars in the bank—literally overnight!”

But the most significant thing about that magazine cover, at least for history and the world at large was that it was seen and eagerly digested by two young, unknown computer nerdnicks in Boston. While walking across Harvard Square to visit his 19-year-old friend Bill Gates, Paul Allen spotted the familiar magazine. The cover showed the rectangular, metal, box-like Altair with its toggle switches and lights on the front panel. The cover title read: “World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models.” Allen bought a copy and raced to show it to his friend.

NEXT—The roots of an empire are planted when Roberts gives Allen and Gates a tryout.

Part II

Ed Roberts loved computers a long time before he designed the first handheld calculator and the first personal computer.

“I’ve worked on computers since high school in the late 1950s,” he said. “The first ones didn’t do very much. I did some analog work in the 1960s, and then integrated circuits became more available and I started a little digital logic stuff.”

This interest progressed from hobby to business in Albuquerque in the early 1970s. Roberts resigned his 10-year career as an electronics instructor and research officer in the U. S. Air Force in 1972 to devote himself full time to the start-up company marketing calculators he designed. He called the passage from calculators to computers a natural one: “It’s sort of an evolutionary thing. The only difference between a cheap calculator and a computer is that you can’t create a program in a cheap calculator.”

Roberts’ Altair 8800 microcomputer on the cover of Popular Electronics heralded the world’s first personal computer. The response was immediate and overpowering. Orders flooded in. Some claim there wasn’t much to the first Altair except for switches on the front plate. Just an electronics “kit,” essentially useless?

“Assembling the Altair was pretty complicated,” Roberts said, “and (for that reason) we sold most of the units already assembled. It wasn’t useless. People used it for accounting, word processing, all kinds of things you think about computers being used for now.”

Still, it lacked its own language. Thanks to two Dartmouth College designers, one was available. John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz created BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) in 1964. Like many early software pioneers, they generously placed their product in the public domain so everyone could use it. While still in high school in Seattle, Bill Gates, with his genius for mathematics, had easily mastered the binary language of BASIC, which uses only two numbers, usually zero and one, to communicate with computers.

“We announced that we wanted a BASIC language for the Altair,” Roberts said. “Bill Gates and Paul Allen called me and said they had an operating BASIC if I wanted to buy it. In fact, we had about 50 people who called and said they had one. I told them all that the first person who shows up with an operating BASIC will get a contract.”

Gates and Allen were bluffing. They didn’t have the language ready, but they were confident they could write one. They followed up their call with a letter offering to license MITS the software and be paid by royalties. Gates and Roberts worked for the next eight weeks, using Harvard’s computers, to develop a language for the Altair. In February, Allen flew to Albuquerque to demonstrate their product. Industry legend says Allen’s “audition” worked flawlessly, and a dazzled Roberts bought it on the spot.

In Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, author James Wallace describes the first test this way: Suddenly, the Altair came to life. It printed “memory size?” Allen typed “print 2 + 2.” The Altair printed out the correct answer: “4.”

“Those guys were really stunned to see their computer work,” Allen said. “This was a fly-by-night computer company. I was pretty stunned myself that it worked the first time. But I tried not to show much surprise.”

Roberts’ reaction, in the book, was: “I was dazzled. It was certainly impressive. The Altair was a complex system, and they had never seen it before. What they had done went a lot further than you could have reasonably expected.”

That’s not the way Roberts described the event to me.

“Paul showed up in late February or March with his copy of BASIC,” Roberts said. “He loaded it on the machine and it came up, said, ‘OK,’ and crashed.”

The two fledgling entrepreneurs worked all night trying to debug their program, Roberts recalls. Allen worked in his Albuquerque hotel room talking long distance to Gates in Boston. The next afternoon, Allen was back at MITS for another attempt.

“He brought in his (paper) tape and this one did run,” Roberts said. “Like most of the software then it had bugs, but it ran. They (Allen and Gates) had the first one which actually worked on the Altair.”

Roberts was so impressed with Allen that he eventually hired him as director of software for MITS. But in addition to his software responsibilities, Allen also began to surreptitiously guard his and his partner’s positions with MITS, Roberts said.

“After Allen and Gates, there were actually a number of people who showed up (with workable programs),” Roberts said. “Some of them I didn’t find out about until years after I left Albuquerque. Allen was supposed to be developing our software capability within the company (but) what he was doing, is, every time someone showed up with a program that looked like it was competitive to what they were doing, or was interesting, he would pull it out, basically steal it, and send it over to Bill—especially the last few months they were there they were doing it in wholesale quantities.

“By that time, we were a major force in computers. We were increasing the supply of computers—according to IBM—at the rate of 1 percent per month. The world supply of computers was being increased 1 percent a month by a tiny little company in Albuquerque!

“And that was what gave them their start—the fact that they were able to say that they had Altair software. They could argue that the BASIC was theirs, even though we completely paid for it!”

Eventually, there would be lawsuits about who owned the software, and MITS would be sold to a larger company, Pertec. Ed Roberts would be bought out and head back to Georgia, medical school, and relative obscurity. But before he left, he learned a lot about the young Bill Gates who he would eventually employ.

“He was a smart-alecky kid, bright, like a lot of nerds, bright!” Roberts said. “So was Paul. Paul was probably more creative than Bill in my opinion, even though he has had almost no publicity. If it hadn’t have been for Paul, Bill would be teaching mathematics in some backwater college now.

“I came close to firing Bill on a dozen occasions. If I had fired him, that would have been it. You would never have heard of Bill Gates. (For example) He came into my office one day demanding to be put on the payroll. Paul was on payroll; Bill wasn’t. ‘You’re paying Paul, but not me,’ he said. ‘You’re supposed to get royalties from the software,’ I told him. ‘People are stealing all of our software.’ he said. ‘All of your customers are crooks.’

“I pointed out to him that he was three months behind on his (software development) work, but I went ahead and put him on the payroll for $10 an hour, so there was a question there that they even owned the software because they were now on our payroll.”

Bill Gates told Ed Roberts that he never expected to make any money from personal computers because people were stealing his product—and even voiced such a controversial opinion in the company newsletter—so Roberts took pity on him and paid him an hourly wage.

“Over the years, I’ve thought about that conversation a lot,” Roberts laughs, “I’d be interested in his reaction to that today—I haven’t talked to him in several years.”

NEXT—”You couldn’t deal with him; nobody could deal with him”.

Part III

It’s been years since Ed Roberts has talked to his former employee Bill Gates.

“I saw him at a wedding seven or eight years ago, and he sent someone over—I still had kind of bad feelings about it— to say that he was Bill Gates and he would like to talk to me, or something like that, and I said, ‘I know who the little son-of-a-bitch is.’”

The good doctor leans back in his chair and laughs. You get the idea that he’s shrouding some fondness for Gates, but he’s not ready to embrace him in his memories.

The “bad feelings” he felt upon seeing Gates is a reference to the clash that came between MITS (owned at the time by Pertec) and Gates and Paul Allen.

“He thought I didn’t remember him, but I did. But it gives you an idea that he was a relatively minor character at MITS even though if you see the stuff now that he’s written he acts like he had some kind of policy-making role at MITS. He had none. Paul had some policy-making role as director of software, but not Bill. He was always too nonlinear to count on.

“As a matter of fact, it’s kind of surprising that he’s been able to do as well (as he has) with Microsoft. At the time he was with MITS, he couldn’t have put anything together. You just couldn’t deal with him. Nobody could deal with him.”

He leans forward again, very serious.

“I’m surprised someone hasn’t come to me for help in negotiating with him because I could have made them millions!” he said. “The thing they don’t realize when they’re negotiating with Bill—I see him on television and he’s still the same guy he was then; he comes across as a squeaky little nerd and he doesn’t really know what’s going on—and that’s a terrible mistake to make with that guy.

“He’s a classic example of a guy who’s smarter than you are, and he’s meaner than a junkyard dog! If you don’t understand that and you try to negotiate with him on the assumption that you’re dealing with some sort of computer nerd, you’re going to get burned bad. And people have all along.”

He leans back again.

“Sounds like I’m really down on Bill and I don’t mean it that way. Fact is, and I’ve said it before, and this is the real bottom line, if Bill hadn’t have been as successful as he has been, people would never have heard of me, they would never have heard of MITS and all of the stuff we did at MITS. And we did a lot of things at MITS that I think changed the world. And the BASIC that’s used now is just the continual growth of that original BASIC.

“But, if it hadn’t been for Bill, that would all have disappeared, so I guess he’s offsetting any of the negative feelings I may have had.”

I asked Roberts what he thought made Gates different from the rest of us?

“Luck,” he said. “But when you say that you have to qualify it. We make our own luck. Not to take anything away from him. A lot of it is being in the right place at the right time. He’s certainly not always understood the market. I had to bring him on payroll because he didn’t think he would make any money. But, he’s capitalized on it any time he’s had a good position. He had enough acumen to capitalize. You can’t take that away from him; you have to be impressed with that.”

And your employing Bill Gates and Paul Allen at MITS all those years ago. How key was that to what is happening today?

“It was 100 percent key,” he said. “Not because of me, but because of MITS at that time. When Pertec bought us out, we accounted for 85 percent of that market, so whoever had the Altair software—and we’re talking about two or three years of development that had gone on—whoever had that in an industry moving so fast was so far ahead of anybody else that nobody else could compete with them. No matter who we had picked to do that software, they would have been in the same position. The thing that happened to those guys, the thing they sold to IBM, was the BASIC they developed at MITS.

“If it hadn’t have been for the Altair, no one would ever have heard of them.”

Roberts owned MITS from 1970 until 1977. His work force grew from a couple to more than 600. During this time, he designed the first American-made LSI calculator, the first LSI digital clock, and the very first personal computer, the Altair. By the time his company was purchased by Pertec, it was enjoying about $300 million in annual sales. He remained for a time after the sale as a divisional vice president, but then, in Pertec’s opinion, he became too “vocal” during delicate arbitration negotiations with Microsoft, and they asked him to back off.

“They put me in the ‘skunk works,” he said, but he was still able to tinker with new products. There was one in particular he is proud of.

“I developed a laptop and took it to a meeting in Phoenix Pertec had with their marketing and engineering folks,” he said. “The marketing people got real excited about the idea of a laptop computer, but the people who ran the company said, ‘We don’t think people need a computer on their desk, much less their laps,’ so I said, ‘One of us doesn’t know what we’re doing.’ So I resigned.”

At the time of Roberts’ newest invention, Pertec was arbitrating with Gates and Allen over the ownership of the Altair software the two had developed while working for MITS. Roberts makes no secret of his belief they didn’t own it. In spite of his arguments, Pertec didn’t care to sever its relationship with Gates and Allen. When Roberts argued that Pertec should stand up to the two and fight for ownership, the company told him they’d had enough of his advice.

“They considered me a troublemaker and I was invited to go somewhere else,” he said.

Using his $1.5 million in Pertec stock from the sale of MITS, he swapped toggles and switches and chips in Albuquerque for corn and hogs and cows on a thousand-acre farm in rural Wheeler County, Georgia.

NEXT—What went so wrong at MITS?

Part IV

Five months after Bill Gates and Paul Allen demonstrated that their program would run the blocky little Altair, the two signed a contract giving MITS exclusive rights to use and license the BASIC language they had written for it. MITS agreed to pay them a royalty for each sale of the language, up to a maximum of $180,000. Included in the contract was a clause that said MITS must use its “best efforts” to promote BASIC, and if it did not, then the contract would be terminated. That clause would play a key role in the future of the new company which Gates and Allen had formed, Microsoft.

“They asked me if I objected to the name, and I did,” Roberts said. “They were supposed to be developing software capability internally for MITS, not some other company.”

But Roberts acquiesced. He still feels today he had a contract with two young men, not a corporate name.

Gates didn’t think much of MITS, according to the book Hard Drive. In his mind, every good idea at MITS was only half executed and he didn’t hesitate to let Roberts know how he felt. “MITS was run in a very strange way,” he (Gates) said, “and everyone there felt poorly. We all thought, gee, this thing is a mess. And there was a vacuum of leadership.”

The company’s foul-ups drove the business-minded Gates up the wall—especially the problem MITS was having with dynamic memory boards for the Altair.

“Bill has attempted to denigrate what went on at MITS for several reasons,” Roberts said. “I guess to make his own significance more important. But we weren’t selling tens of thousands of machines because they didn’t work. They worked.”

Dynamic memory chips allowed the Altair to run BASIC, and any glitch in them created embarrassment for the company.

Gates ranted and raved at Roberts about the problems he saw, according to Hard Drive. He and Allen needed cash flow to fund their young company’s growth. How could they expect royalties from their agreement with MITS when things at MITS were so screwed up?

Roberts said it was Gates’ job to write the software to debug the offending chip, which was causing a problem. The computers with the problem chips were all eventually replaced, he said.

“Read what Bill has said,” Roberts said. “His whole reality with MITS was this one card which had a problem in it. He was assigned to that project to write software that would debug it. That’s the reason he knew about it. (And) that’s the only thing he’s said about MITS that’s valid in terms of criticism in terms of reliability of the product. The computers were much more reliable than the software at that time.”

Soon after Altair’s premiere, other computers began hitting the developing market: Commodore, Radio Shack’s TRS-80, the Apple II. Microsoft and Roberts began squabbling over selling Microsoft’s software to these new companies. Microsoft saw huge potential; Roberts saw competition. Microsoft broke away from MITS to operate on its own. On April 20, 1977, Microsoft sued MITS to terminate the licensing agreement for BASIC. Almost one month to the day later, Roberts sold MITS to Pertec.

The disagreement over the software’s ownership turned into arbitration, as provided by the contract language. Microsoft argued that it had not been paid the royalties it was due and that MITS had failed to promote the software as promised. MITS, when still under Roberts’ control, had obtained a temporary restraining order against Microsoft to prevent it from distributing the software.

“In the TRO we had against them we stopped them; we won,” he said. “We had documented proof of Bill Gates perjuring himself.” Roberts alleges that Gates represented himself as being in San Francisco where his software was being stolen and MITS was doing nothing to protect it.

“It turned out that he was in Boston when this was going on,” Roberts said. “He was asked in a deposition about this and he said he ‘misspoke.’ You didn’t misspoke, you lied!”

But Pertec, assuming control over the company, let it slide, Roberts said.

“They didn’t want to push it. I wanted to castrate him, but Pertec didn’t. I was thought of as kind of a radical. They let it go. They did this all the way through. They wanted to work it out with him, and maybe they were right. They considered me a troublemaker, and I was invited to go somewhere else.”

Eventually, the arbitrator ruled in favor of Microsoft. “The guy doing the arbitration didn’t understand it,” Roberts said. “I went back and said, ‘Wait a minute!’ But the net affect was that they had an agreement outside of the arbitration that Pertec could continue to use the software but that Microsoft could take it. I’ve been told by people who were there that Pertec was under the assumption that they could deal with Bill and that Bill would be their main customer and go out of his way to support them. But the problem is, Bill saw they weren’t going anywhere and that they didn’t understand the business at all.

“It was MITS’ software,” said Roberts, still adamant after 20 years. “Pertec let them get away with it because they wanted to maintain a relationship with Bill.

“When Pertec bought us out,” Roberts said, “we accounted for about 85 percent of the market, so whoever had that Altair software—and we’re talking about two or three years of development—in an industry moving so fast was so far ahead of anybody else that nobody else could compete with them. No matter who we had picked to do that software, they would have been in the same position as these guys (Gates and Allen).”

When IBM went shopping for a computer language and operating system for its top-secret plan to enter the personal computer market in the late 1970s, they centered in on Microsoft. Gates and Allen had the BASIC software and were able to buy the rights to an operating system from Seattle Computer.

“They bought MS-DOS (the operating system) from a guy (Seattle Computer) in Seattle,” Roberts said. “They paid him $15,000, sold it to IBM for royalties, and the rest is history.

“About 10 years after the deal, the guy (Seattle Computer) sued them for $50 million. It looked like he didn’t have a case, but they settled. That’s what got them going: Having the MITS software got them into IBM, and then he (Gates) was bright enough to sign another source for an operating system when they (IBM) couldn’t buy the system used on Altair-type systems. It was owned by this guy who wouldn’t sell to IBM. So IBM went back to Microsoft and said, ‘We can’t use your BASIC because we can’t use the operating system,’ and they said, ‘We’ll get you an operating system.’ And he rounded up that operating system for them, and that was probably the key thing that turned them into the big time.

“If it had not have been for Altair, no one would have ever heard of them.”

Next—Down home in Georgia with no bad memories on his mind.

Part V

Pertec gave Roberts $1.5 million in stock, and the two parted ways. He signed a five-year non-compete agreement and moved back to Wheeler County, Georgia, and bought a farm. Pertec absorbed MITS into its corporate arms and several years later was purchased by a division of Volkswagen.

“My Pertec stock when I left was worth $6.25 a share (about $1.5 million at the time),” he said. “When I got rid of it two years later, it was worth $18 a share, so I didn’t go bankrupt. I did pretty well.”

In 1982, Mercer University in nearby Macon opened a medical school. Roberts, who had always dreamed of becoming a doctor, decided to apply in spite of his age. (“I went into engineering after high school so I could be involved in medical research,” he said). Mercer accepted the 39-year-old former computer whiz.

“My agreement with Pertec was that I wouldn’t do anything competitive with them in digital electronics,” he said. “A lot of those agreements don’t hold water, but when you have a considerable amount of money involved, they hold a lot of water. But I had no inclination to do anything anyway. When the five years ran out, I had already started med school.”

He and his wife, Joan, divorced after he completed his residency. It was an amicable parting, he said.

“I wanted out for personal reasons,” he said. “I still had two young children in high school and I wanted to make sure they didn’t suffer for anything that I did, or the fact that she and I were not going to be married. So, I paid all the bills and gave her a huge settlement of basically everything I owned except for my clothes and my vehicle.”

And the farm?

“That too.”

So, basically, Dr. Roberts moved to Cochran in 1987 and started over.

He married his second wife, Donna, a nurse, but that marriage has also gone by the bye. Today, the grandfather of six is single again.

Asked how he is doing financially, he said, “Right now I eat regularly. The kind of practice I have here you don’t make huge amounts of money. But I make a contribution (to the community), and I’m doing something I enjoy.”

Asked if there was something he would change if he could start over, he said, “Every day I make decisions that if I could replay them, I would. Every day. So, there are lots of them.”

Any one in particular? Anything that would have made a fundamental change in the way life has played out?

He thought for almost a minute, then said, “One was the contract I had with Bill and Paul. I didn’t want to be harsh. I felt these were young kids and I was in the driver’s seat and they needed me bad and I made sure I wasn’t getting into a situation where I was ‘godfathering’ them. And trying to do that, the net effect was I was leaving us open. That’s the reason they were able to get into arbitration. I should have been a lot tougher.

“And I’ve thought about that, but it wouldn’t have made any difference with Pertec. They would have lost that software anyway. If I had had a contract that was absolutely airtight, and things had gone the same way, with that exception, the arbitration might have turned out a little bit differently, but it wouldn’t have affected it other than those guys wouldn’t have had any (royalty payment) money.”

Today, he remains involved in a small way with electronics. He has owned a few small companies—and sold them—without making much money out of it.

“I’ve written some articles on electrocardiology and designed some vital signs monitors,” he said. “I do some software now, but I like hardware better. The systems have gotten so complicated in the past few years. It’s not easy to build a system with just a small group of people. That takes all the fun out of it.”

He owns no patents on any of his work.

“I had no patents at MITS,” he said, “Probably if I had to pick a mistake, that would be it. That was a mistake, but we were so broke that the idea of spending a few thousand for patents—I had paychecks in my desk uncashed for months; I pledged my house to keep MITS open—the money was really never there.”

Did he ever imagine the things that are occurring today?

“It’s bigger than I ever imagined, and I imagine pretty big,” he said.

And what about the future?

“Predicting the future is easy,” he said. “Computers will get bigger and more complex and faster. And cheaper. The ability to incorporate all of this is completely predictable. But ‘what’ is going to be the next big application like the Internet? I could make Bill look like a pauper if I knew that.”

And is the man who invented the personal computer happy?

“I’m reasonably happy,” he said. “I get asked all the time if I wish I had made a billion dollars. Yes, I do, but do I lose sleep over it? No. My dad was a washing machine and air conditioner repairman. He was on his own. We were always lower middle class, so the MITS stuff was wealth by my standards. I could buy almost anything I wanted, but I wasn’t any happier then than I am now. (And) I doubt if Bill and Paul are any happier now than they would have been if they just had an interesting job. Bill does what he does: Works hard and enjoys what he’s doing. That tells you the money’s not everything.”

Looking back, is there anything that Dr. Roberts would have done differently?

“I probably wouldn’t have bought a farm,” he said. “You’ve got to be a lot smarter than I am to farm.”

–

Obama’s health plan is right way, wrong path

 

I believe there will be some type of universal health care some day. I will be in Washington next month to join the crowd protesting the proposed plan. I do not believe the federal government can manage a federal plan. (I have been advised to stay inside my hotel after 5:30 p.m. while visiting the Capitol. This is because of crime, not politics).

Obama’s name here is synonymous with Bush’s name, Clinton’s name, Reagan’s name, et al. Federal control period is an impending financial disaster. Take this one example to hang this premise on: When I go for a checkup at the VA hospital, they draw my blood and I wait for about an hour to see my doctor. When I go into his office, he is sitting there examining all of my blood work. The VA gets a pass to own its own automatic blood testing equipment. The VA does not have to send it out to a private lab where the results take several, long days. My private doctor could do exactly the same thing: give  you immediate results! So why doesn’t he/she? Because the anti-trust department says this creates a trust, and locks out the poor independent  blood labs from competing. I suppose this is how the government helps to lower treatment costs?

At the town hall meetings I have attended in Georgia, there is a lot of resentment against illegal immigrants from Mexico. They have driven up hospital costs in many cities, since they have no insurance and no money.

I have a “friend” who employes illegals for housekeeping. Under the present circumstances, the housekeeper, her husband, and two of their three children cannot become U.S. citizens. No way.
They have been here 12 years and all of their children have/or will graduate from high school here but they must pay out-of-state-tuition to attend college in Georgia. They cannot get a driver’s licence. When they are sick, they go to the local emerency room.

Here’s the rub. I am against illegal immigration but I believe that once they are in the U.S., then the U.S. laws apply.
My friend’s housekeeping family had to pay a coyote thousands of dollars to sneak them into the U.S.  If this present plan passes, it is going to encourage more  illegal immigration. I suppose the feds could impose anti-trust enforcement against the coyotes, but they don’t have any competition anyway.

Once when I was an editor in San Diego,  I proposed moving the USMC’s 29 Palms training base and Naval Air Station to the borderlands east of San Diego on the Mexican border, with the Marines providing security. The beautiful military bases on the Southern California coast then could be converted into seaside National Parks and limited development. It was only half-serious at the time.

But I understood 20 years ago that there would be mass illegal immigration. That’s the root of the problem. ILLEGAL immigration. No one really seems to care. I was very disappointed with George W., even though I supported his election. When it came right down to it, George was a pussy. I remember being in my bed in my San Diego apartment near Balboa Park and hearing the gunfire rolling in from the canyons far off in the darkness.

But, back to universal care. I have always believed that health care was not a devine right, but it should be. Illnesses are neither fair nor democratic. My proposal is to provide a “medicare” type of insurance to children, birth to 18. There would be certain restrictions to keep the costs down. Realistically, health care is generally free to young and old alike in America. Ask any hospital how many they turn away. None.

There’s the deal breaker: As long as it is political, there will be a  fight.

There’s a better way. Our representatives are just not smart enough to figure it out.

Have you notices the audiences in the Town Hall meetings on television?  The pro-universal health care advocates are generally  black; the anti-universal health care advocates are usually white.

What does that make me? A bigot, or a realist? I think just an observer.

What’s it all about, Dicky?

 

A wise reporter, Julie Posetti, writing on Editor & Publisher’s site, referred to Twitterers, Facebookers, Bloggers, and other non-professional media types as  driven by “egotistical banality.” With this new blog site, I am honored to join this new fraternity! The only thing I would add to Ms. Posetti’s post is that all professional writers and journalists are also members, even if they don’t understand that.

I wish I had kept all of my textbooks from my journalism classes at Ole Miss and Eastern Washington University, but they now dwell in some compost site. But I believe I remember freedom of the press is somewhere in the constitution, and there is much confusion about what this means. I think to everyone but me, that is. I have been an employed print reporter for more than 45 years of my life. My belief in what “freedom of the press” means has made me a rogue among hundreds of my colleagues. 

It is my opinion, which is normally correct,  we are all reporters. Any person in America can write an article or an editorial expressing his or her opinion, make copies of it, and peddle it on the streets to anyone who cares to read it or buy it. It is a “newspaper.” No, it does not have a sales department, print shop, and you might possibly have to purchase a tax permit or license from the authorities,  but that’s what it is. I even have displeasure with “press cards,” press passes, press parking, seating for “the press,” etc. Of course this would make it more difficult for employed reporters to get as close to their source as they would like, but they have no more rights under the constitution than anyone else. Naturally, I myself have enjoyed many of these perks.

But, I was once denied a “press card” by the California Highway Patrol and the San Diego Police Department because I was the editor of a respected “business publication.” not a “news” paper. Had I been as wealthy as Bill Gates, I’m positive I could have disrupted the status quo for all reporters everywhere by challenging this. My own publishers, whenever I asked for help, just smiled at me as if I were a favorite puppy. But I digress. Even though it is logical for the restrictions against regular citizens to be initiated by various governmental agencies for the appropriateness of “getting the news property dissiminated to the public as quickly as possible,” the means employed are unconstitutional. 

“Why is this not applicable to radio and television,” I am often asked by lesser thinkers. This is so simple: There are a limited number of radio frequencies available, and someone has to control them or the air would be full of garble, interference and nonsense, as it is anyway. That is why radio and television are regulated. Anyone can publish a newspaper! There is room for everyone. A television personality once asked me at a cocktail party in Spokane how I felt about television reporting? He answered before I could: “Contempt!” And we just smiled at one another. 

What is the most important thing about publishing a newspaper, any newspaper? Great writing? Strong opinion? (And all you really need to write a column or an editorial is an opinion). None of these. You need advertising to survive (except for Bill). If you don’t think so, ask the Miami Herald, the Seattle PI, and a sad, growing number of these titans, “Why the collapse?” 

Obviously, a columnist with the NYT is going to have humongous readership, because of its financial and social infrastructure, and a simple neighborhood bulletin is not. Most “professionals” enjoy their status as they underrate their support system, and overrate their own skill. 

This does not mean they do not have great writers. They certainly do. 

Perhaps now you can now answer the question about how I feel about bloggers and the Internet? If not, then this is not the site for you to revisit.

There is much, much more to come. All of your questions, not only about journalism, will be answered.

FINAL POINT: I have always told my own young writers and reporters two important rules: First, remember your job. If  you have a tremendous article–Why did Coke change it’s formula?; Where is Natalie Holloway?; Amelia Erheart? (who incidentally disappeared while I was recovering from my birth); etc; You could literally write it down on toilet paper and people would fight to read it! You don’t even need an art director, or even good grammar. Number two: Never, never give your young child aspirin when they appear ill. Aspirin in a child’s system is a killer! Actually, the second rule is more important than the first. Ask your doctor.

STAY TUNED!