GoKawiilHenry Edward Roberts was a mustang. He had enlisted in the USAF in May of 1962, and at the age of 27, had gained his commission in 1968 after attending Oklahoma State University and earning a degree in electrical engineering. As a second lieutenant in the Air Force service at the Effects Branch of the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB, he’d been tasked with procuring a Hewlett-Packard 9100 programmable desktop calculator. He was immediately entranced by the machine.
Even at this time, Roberts wasn’t a novice in the realm of computation. In his teens, he’d been a hobbyist, and he’d built machines using digital logic implemented in relays. He’d even started and run two electronics businesses while in the Air Force: Reliance Engineering, and Reliable Radio. But neither the Air Force nor business were Ed’s goals. His first goal was money and that meant business, but that money was sought only to enable him to own a plane, live on a farm, and complete medical school.
A fellow officer, Forrest M. Mims III, was interested in model rocketry, and he wanted to make and sell small flashing light systems for night launches for rockets. Roberts, Mims, Stan Cagle (civilian electrical engineer whom Roberts knew from college), and Robert Zaller (another officer) met at Roberts’ house to discuss a line of products for rocket telemetry. By the end of that meeting, Roberts was elected president of whatever the company turned out to be. After a series of successive meetings, the name MIT Systems was decided upon due to its similarity to the school, and after that, Cagle suggested Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. As Reliance Engineering still existed, had a credit rating, and had legally existed, it was also decided that MITS would be a subsidiary of Reliance Engineering, but this didn’t happen. In late 1969, the company was incorporated in Albuquerque, New Mexico as Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, commonly referred to as MITS. Each of the four were given 950 shares and each contributed $100. Another 200 shares were given to the company’s attorney. The first product was the TLF-1 light flasher. The second was “The Booklet of Model Rocketry Telemetry” written by Mims. Transmitters and telemetry modules followed. Despite advertising in the magazine Model Rocketry, the company wasn’t moving a ton of product.
Opticom article by Mims in Popular Electronics, November of 1970
The group had realized that the market for model rocketry, being constituted primarily of professors and hobbyists, could not properly support a company. As the group had taken a rather severe pay cut to found, run, and work at MITS this wasn’t great. So much so, Zaller had to leave for a bit and get proper work to support his household. Mims and Roberts then had the bright idea to build electronics. The first of these was an infrared voice communicator called the Opticom. The first transmitter and receiver pair was completed that summer, financing to build around a thousand kits was obtained from a friend, and Mims managed to write an article about the construction, operation, and modification of the devices for Popular Electronics receiving a check for $400 (this was large sum, adjusted for inflation to May 2026 ~ $3433). This article was also a good bit of advertising for the young company’s product. Orders began coming in.
Roberts, it would seem, could not get past that desktop calculator. He began working on a kit calculator immediately after having helped finish the Opticom. Meanwhile, Stan Cagle began working on an infrared intrusion alarm kit and a solid state laser kit. These diverging paths created quite a bit of tension, and while Cagle and Mims were contemplating buying out Roberts’ stock, things materialized the opposite way. On the 10th of November in 1970 at a meeting at the Sunport in Albuquerque, Roberts offered to buy the others out for a combination of $300 cash, another $300 the following March, and $350 in equipment. Cagle and Mims accepted. After all, they’d never even drawn a salary from the fledgling company. Before the two had even signed the agreement, Roberts had recruited engineer Bill Yates (second lieutenant from the Laser Division at the weapons lab), and a fresh investment from another officer. The company moved from a former sandwich shop to Roberts’ garage, and then to a rented house on 2016 San Mateo.
MITS 816, image from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, number 1986.0463.02
For his part, Mims became a freelancer around August of 1971, sold some solid state laser articles to Popular Electronics, and wrote the manuals for the laser kit at MITS as a freelancer. The manuals were good, and Roberts asked Mims to write the manual for the calculator project in exchange for one of the calculators. The calculator was completed in 1971 and appeared in Popular Electronics in November that year, just a month after the laser article had debuted.
The 816 was offered as a kit for $179, assembled for $275, with parts and boards available for purchase separately if needed. Circuit diagrams and other technical instructions could be purchased for just $2. The 816 was a major success for the company, and they finally turned a profit. Despite this success, Roberts wasn’t done. Before the machine was completed and began shipping, he had a 32-step programming unit that would make the 816 a programmable calculator (this was made into a product that could connect to the 816 or 1440). He also began thinking about building a microcomputer, but he found the 4004 and 8008 to be insufficient.
The house the company was working out of was scheduled for demolition to widen the street, so MITS moved to 5404 Coal Avenue, and they then later moved to 6328 Linn Avenue. With more space, the company hired technical writers and a receptionist, but more importantly for history, this space allowed the company to more quickly and efficiently put machines together. More calculators followed from those with more digits, to handheld calculators, to scientific calculators with trigonometric functions. They were doing well, but success is a signal to the market of money to be had. Competitors moved in, and by 1974, MITS was carrying around $200k in debt (about $1.3 million in 2026 dollars).
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