Ed Roberts

Roberts was born on September 13, 1941, in Miami, Florida, to Henry Melvin Roberts, an appliance repairman, and Edna Wilcher Roberts, a registered nurse. His younger sister Cheryl was born in 1947. During World War II, while his father was in the Army, Roberts and his mother lived on the Wilcher family farm in Wheeler County, Georgia. After the war, the family returned to Miami, but Roberts would spend his summers with his grandparents in rural Georgia. Roberts's father had an appliance repair business in Miami.

Roberts became interested in electronics and built a small relay-based computer while in high school. Medicine was his true passion, however, and he entered the University of Miami with the intention of becoming a doctor, the first in his family to attend college. There he met a neurosurgeon who shared his interest in electronics. The doctor suggested that Roberts get an engineering degree before applying to medical school, and Roberts changed his major to electrical engineering.

Roberts married Joan Clark while at the university, and when she became pregnant Roberts knew that he would have to drop out of school to support his new family. The U.S. Air Force had a program that would pay for college, and in May 1962 he enlisted with the hope of finishing his degree through the Airman Education & Commissioning Program.

After basic training, Roberts attended the Cryptographic Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Because of his electrical engineering studies at college, Roberts was made an instructor at the Cryptographic School when he finished the course. To augment his meager enlisted man's pay, Roberts worked on several off-duty projects and even set up a one-man company, Reliance Engineering. The most notable job was to create the electronics that animated the Christmas characters in the window display of Joske's department store in San Antonio. In 1965, he was selected for an Air Force program to complete his college degree and become a commissioned officer. Roberts earned an electrical engineering degree from Oklahoma State University in 1968 and was assigned to the Laser Division of the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1968, he looked into applying to medical school but learned that, at age 27, he was considered too old.

Roberts married Joan Clark (b. 1941) in 1962 and they had five sons, Melvin (b. 1963), Clark (b. 1964), John David (b. 1965), Edward (b. 1970), Martin (b. 1975) and a daughter Dawn (b. 1983). They were divorced in 1988.

Roberts married Donna Mauldin in 1991 and they were still married when interviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in April 1997. He was married to Rosa Cooper from 2000 until his death.

Roberts died April 1, 2010, after a months-long bout with pneumonia, at the age of 68. His sister, Cheryl R Roberts (b. November 13, 1947 – d. March 6, 2010), of nearby Dublin, Georgia, died at age 62, a few weeks before his death. During his last hospitalization in Macon, hospital staffers were surprised to see Gates, who had come unannounced to visit his first employer. He was survived by his wife, all six of his children and his mother, Edna Wilcher Roberts. All live in Georgia.