We had a thread yesterday on the 1975 lies...so, what should I find last night in some old papers?
The background: my manager asked me to go back into some old software architecture I had done for the company about ten years ago, and so I dug up the big old fat loose-leaf binder with the state diagrams, the object model, etc.etc.
Right there in the front of it was this: Issue #1, September 1975, of Byte magazine. Inside the front cover was the business card of H. Edward Roberts, president of MITS. I had these there to show the small team of engineers ten years ago when we kicked off our (Gateway) project.
Ed Roberts was the creator of the Altair 8800 microcomputer. I met him at a promotional event that September he was doing for the Altair computer kit. My Altair was one of the very early models and was probably about the second or third in Oklahoma City. The guys that wrote that Basic interpreter for the Altair were Bill Gates and Paul Allen. I learned to program machine language from that computer kit. Some may remember Ed from that educational TV program "revenge of the nerds" about the PC industry. He later went back to practise medicine as a good simple old country doctor, while Gates and Allen became multimillionaires.
My point is this: At the exact time frame while Ed created the personal computer industry, and Gates and Allen were planting the seeds of Microsoft, and this poster was at the point of learning something which would allow him to have a career not involved with the cleaning of toilets...
What was the Watchtower Society doing and writing? As usual, prophecy of the immediate end of the world...and cooking up the cover story to follow when nothing happened.
So, who was the true prophet? (and who was the false one?)... In my books, old Ed Roberts rang true, and Franz and the WT were the phonies. It is sad to think that so many current witnesses do not know this or cannot remember it about their own history - 1975 now being so long ago.
James - (of the I have really soldered all those 100 control wires together and clicked all those toggle switches up and down class).