I must admit that I spend more time these days reading the obituaries. Yes, I know, it’s a sure sign of growing old. But a front page obituary in yesterday’s New York Times particularly caught my eye, “Inventor Whose Pioneer PC Helped Inspire Microsoft Dies.”

The obituary highlighted the life of H. Edward Roberts, a country doctor in rural Cochran, Georgia, who also invented what is regarded by many as the first personal computer in the 1970s – the MITS Altair.

Dr. Roberts may not be a household name for many people outside of this small town in Georgia, but he does mean a lot to two of the richest men in the world, who also happen to be co-founders of the Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

It was Roberts’s MITS 8800 Altair “microcomputer” that made it on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine in January 1975, which got the attention of a young Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen. The Altair was the “first inexpensive general-purpose microcomputer, a device that could be programmed to do all manner of tasks,” as described by the New York Times.

Gates and Allen were interested in writing software for the Altair. In fact, the lure of the Altair was so strong that Gates dropped out of Harvard and Allen quit his job at Honeywell, and they both moved to Albuquerque, NM — home to Roberts’s small MITS company. And it was there in New Mexico that Gates and Allen founded Microsoft in April 1975, not in Washington State, which they later moved to in 1979.

In 1977, Roberts sold his computer company, later attended medical school, and then moved to rural Georgia where he practiced medicine until he died this past Thursday at the age of 68.

Meanwhile, the programming language that Gates and Allen created for the Altair, called Microsoft BASIC, “was the beginning of what would become the world’s largest software company and would make its founders billionaires many times over.”

But the story doesn’t end here; this is where it gets “personal.”

In January 1985, I walked into a graduate school microcomputer lab at Indiana University, where I met by future husband, who was the lab’s teaching assistant. He showed me the basics: how to turn on the lab’s first-generation IBM microcomputer (running Microsoft’s MS-DOS), how to save data to its 5.25-inch “floppy disk drive,” and he showed me the difference between a “cold boot” and “warm boot.” I guess it was love at first byte.

We were married in 1987, and ironically, years later in 2003, my husband went to work for Microsoft where he still works today.

Our 23rd anniversary was yesterday.

Thank you H. Edward (Ed) Roberts for changing so many lives around the world, and in Cochran, GA — and thank you for helping to change mine. By the way, happy anniversary to my husband, R. Edward (Ed) Ingle.