Dr. Henry Edward Roberts, the inventor of the Altair dies on the eve of the release of the iPad.

 The Altair kit was first annnounced in January, 1975.   Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft to write a version of the programming language BASIC for the machine.

 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," the Microsoft founders said in a statement.

 This is the BBC