[HN Gopher] CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free...
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CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
Author : rbanffy
Score : 223 points
Date : 2025-07-18 10:22 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| POSSIBLE_FACT wrote:
| Absolutely loved when I randomly caught an episode of Computer
| Chronicles back in the old time days.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I think that, by now, I have watched every episode. He was the
| Bill Gates we needed.
| BruceEel wrote:
| truth. Too bad we got the other one!!!
| whobre wrote:
| He was nothing like BG. Gary was an inventor, educator and
| most of all a visionary. He hated running a business, even
| though he started DRI after failing to convince Intel to buy
| CP/M.
|
| Yes, there are quite a few videos on YouTube about him, named
| "The man who should have been Bill Gates" but that's just
| click baiting. Watch the special episode of "The Computer
| Chronicles" about Gary Kildall and see what his friends and
| business associates say about him.
| BruceEel wrote:
| While we are here, another important article by Kildall has
| been made available online, "Global Expression Optimization
| During Compilation"-1972 [1] - while the field has
| obviously moved on, this is still interesting and relevant
| IMO, if anything it shows what a talented technical writer
| he was.
|
| [1]: https://www.proquest.com/docview/302615627/?fromunauth
| doc=tr...
| agumonkey wrote:
| Kinda saddens me that society usually aligns with marketing
| and business mindset (impressing, selling, profiting)
| instead of people like Kildall. There are many passionated,
| driven, creative, prolific people with intrisic motivations
| that are wasted due to commercial forces.
| rbanffy wrote:
| We ended up with the one this society, which usually
| aligns with business and marketing mindsets, deserves.
|
| In time, we might remake society in a kinder, wiser
| version of itself. At that time, we might even deserve
| more Kildalls.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I remember the early IBM PC days. PC-DOS was $40. CPM/86
| was $240. Both were available, people simply picked the
| cheaper one. I used both, and there was nothing better
| about CPM/86.
|
| Due to inflation, this is like $113 vs $679 today. It was
| a no-brainer to buy MS-DOS instead. Kildall clearly was a
| businessman wanting to make money off of it.
| whobre wrote:
| It was IBM who set the price. According to Kildall's
| right-hand Tom Rolander, they were shocked when they saw
| the price difference.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > It was IBM who set the price
|
| Not what I heard at the time - IBM accommodated what
| Kildall wanted. Kildall could have sold it separately at
| a competitive price.
| whobre wrote:
| https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10271
| 725...
| WalterBright wrote:
| The date on it is 2016. 33 years later. I don't find that
| particularly convincing.
|
| BTW, I've read a lot of computer histories, and I often
| find errors in them. This is why professional historians
| try to use contemporary sources as much as possible.
| terabyterex wrote:
| This paints Bill Gates as not a tech person and a business
| first person, which is not true. He got a BASIC compiler on
| the altair which MITS thought couldn't be done. He helped
| Wozniak implement a version of BASIC supporting floating
| point numbers. Gates didn't even want to take Microsoft
| public. They had to convince him. Ballmer was the biggest
| businessman in the bunch. Hell, he was the one that
| suggested kidall since Microsoft wasn't in the OS business.
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| This is mostly true. Gates was a tech wizard - a great
| programmer before there were even books about
| programming. But to make it sound like Gates wasn't a
| business-first guy is wrong - he wanted to sell software
| from day 1. Read any early bio about him and his speech
| about selling software to the homebrew club (https://en.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists).
| rbanffy wrote:
| > BASIC compiler
|
| Interpreter - an entirely different kind of animal.
| Microsoft didn't get a BASIC compiler until much later.
|
| > He helped Wozniak implement a version of BASIC
| supporting floating point numbers.
|
| No. He sold Apple a BASIC, then used it as leverage to
| prevent Apple from making a BASIC for the Macintosh.
|
| > Ballmer was the biggest businessman in the bunch.
|
| He suggested cutting Paul Allen's family off when Allen
| was battling cancer.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Um, it is necessary to compile a program before being
| able to interpret it. I don't know how early BASICs were
| implemented, but the usual method is to compile it to
| some sort of intermediate representation, and then
| interpret that representation.
|
| D's compile time function execution engine works that
| way. So does the Javascript compiler/interpreter engine I
| wrote years ago, and the Java compiler I wrote eons ago.
|
| The purpose to going all the way to generating machine
| code is the result often runs 10x faster.
| eichin wrote:
| > necessary to compile
|
| Um, no? your experience is probably at least two decades
| after the time period in question.. The more advanced
| versions of, for example, the TRS-80 BASIC (part of this
| "microcomputer BASICs that all share a common set of
| bugs") did no more than tokenize - so, `10 PRINT "Hello"`
| would have a binary representation for the line number, a
| single byte token for PRINT, then " H E L L O " and an
| end-of-line marker. Actually interpreting the code
| involved just reading it linearly; GOTO linenumber
| involved scanning the entire code in memory for that line
| number (and yes, people really did optimize things by
| putting GOTO and GOSUB targets earlier in the program so
| the interpreter would find them faster :-)
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I was going to post this, but you beat me to it.
|
| It's a VM of a sort, and the p-code the VM executes is
| tokenized input.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Tokenizing it and interpreting the token stream is
| _still_ a compilation process. Even if it re-tokenized it
| each time it executed a line.
| wvenable wrote:
| Tokenizing is a necessary but not a sufficient task for
| compilation. I could tokenize this comment to efficiently
| store it in a database but that would have nothing to do
| with compilation.
| stevekemp wrote:
| It is not necessary to compile a program, in the general
| case, before executing it.
|
| Many programming languages parse their program to an AST
| then walk that AST interpretting as they go. But for
| BASIC you can parse/execute statement by statement - no
| need to parse the whole program ahead of time, and
| certainly zero need to compile to either machine code or
| any internal representation.
|
| Remember at the time we're talking about 64k was a lot of
| RAM. Some machines had less.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The parsing, even if line by line as necessary, is still
| compiling.
| vidarh wrote:
| In 45 years of writing software, I've never before seen
| anyone call tokenizing a BASIC program compilation. It's
| decidedly not common usage.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've been writing compilers for 45 years now. Tokenizing
| is a big part of every textbook on compilers. To resolve
| expressions (which are recursive in nature) it would have
| had to do more than just tokenizing. While this isn't
| hard at all, it's "parsing" which is also qualifying it
| as a compiler.
|
| I.e. the basic program was lexing and parsing. It's a
| compiler. A very simple one, sure, but a compiler.
| vidarh wrote:
| Yes, but tokenization on its own is not compilation any
| more than whiskers are a cat just because a cat has them.
|
| "Nobody" uses it that way, and language is defined by
| use.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Compilers generate code in another, usually lower level
| language that is executed by reading _all_ of the code
| that could be executed first. Interpreters (such as the
| BASIC interpreter we are discussing here) read only that
| part of the code that gets executed and typically call
| functions rather than that they generate code (never mind
| JIT). Tokenization prior to interpretation is technically
| an optional step (it 's just an efficiency boost) and is
| not _normally_ confused with compilation even if there
| are some superficial similarities.
|
| You of all people should know this, come on.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| You have an idiosyncratic definition of "compiler" then.
| Many BASICs, including the MS family of BASICs, did
| tokenize keywords to save on memory storage.
|
| But 99.9% of people take "compiler" to mean translating
| source code to either a native CPU instruction set or a
| VM instruction set. In any tutorial on compilers,
| tokenization is only one aspect of compilation, as you
| know very well. And unlike some of the tricky
| tokenization aspects that crop up in languages like C++,
| BASIC interpreters simply had a table of keywords with
| the MSB set to indicate boundaries between keywords. The
| tokenizer simply did greedy "first token which matches
| the next few characters" is the winner, and encoded the
| Nth entry from that table as token (0x80 + N).
|
| When LIST'ing a program, the same table was used: if the
| byte was >= 0x80, then the first N-1 keywords in the
| table were skipped over and the next one was printed out.
|
| There were also BASIC implementations that did not
| tokenize anything; every byte was simply interpreted on
| every execution of the line. There were tiny BASICs where
| instead of using the full keyword "PR" meant "PRINT", and
| "GO" meant "GOTO" etc.
| wvenable wrote:
| Early BASICs didn't compile a program before interpreting
| it. The interpreter read the code as written and executed
| it step-by-step. There was some tokenization; keywords
| were turned into single or double bytes and that was
| literally done when you pressed enter on the keyboard.
| Your source code was these actual tokenized bytes. On the
| Commodore 64, you could type the tokenized versions of
| keywords instead of the full keyword as a shortcut. Even
| numbers were not transformed into bytes ahead of time.
|
| This was used to save memory -- there wasn't much room to
| hold both the source code and an intermediate form. But
| also it wasn't that necessary, with the keywords
| tokenized and the syntax so simple that there wouldn't
| have been much savings in space or performance.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| MITS was correct. TinyBASIC is a very different animal
| from the language for time-sharing minicomputers that was
| what people actually meant by "BASIC" at the time. For
| one thing, TinyBASIC was a language interpreter and not a
| compiler.
| rbanffy wrote:
| And had no timesharing features at all.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| TS was fairly scarce in those times - let alone on PCs. I
| wonder when the first general-purpose time-share system
| was available ... outside of mainframes? I know UofM's
| MECC had MECC Timesharing System (MTS) up on a Cyber73 in
| 1977 ; before that, their SUMITS had to make do with
| batch-processing on a FunnyVac.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Just like Jobs. He was the marketing and sales guy. Woz, et
| al. were the visionaries and engineers cranking out the
| product.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Jobs had a key difference from Gates - he had taste. He
| insisted on the injection molded case for the Apple II
| instead of sheet metal because he wanted it to look like
| a finished product. He insisted on not having lines
| dividing the color bands in their logo, which made it
| more expensive to print (but much nicer to look at).
|
| Jobs would never let something like Windows 1 escape the
| lab.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| He also refused to have fans in the first several models
| causing a high failure rate...
|
| Form follows function. Just ask Ive.
| esafak wrote:
| Good thing Microsoft fixed it with 2.0!?
| ido wrote:
| They arguably fixed it at 3.0, the first truly popular
| version of windows.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| 3.11 was the first really decent one.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 3.1 was a massive upgrade over 3.0 - it introduced
| TrueType. 3.11 had peer to peer networking and, at least
| in Brazil, doomed Netware in the small business segment.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Jobs had control of the hardware and the software.
|
| Gates (well, the MS programmers) had to make the software
| work on the PC hardware of the time (CGA/EGA video cards
| including non-square pixels and terrible colour palette,
| see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100625-0
| 0/?p=13...)
| wslh wrote:
| I recommend reading "Idea Man" [1] by Paul Allen,
| Microsoft's cofounder, to understand the deep and early
| involvement he and Bill Gates had with computers.
|
| I also recommend Hard Drive (1992) [2] for a deeper look
| into the business side of Bill Gates.
|
| Regardless of any negative opinions about him, I believe
| Bill Gates was/is in a league of his own.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_Man
|
| [2] https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-
| Empire/dp...
| rbanffy wrote:
| > He was nothing like BG.
|
| This is _exactly_ my point.
|
| > He hated running a business, even though he started DRI
| after failing to convince Intel to buy CP/M
|
| This is what uniquely qualified him to bring about a nicer
| timeline.
|
| Sadly, we got the second rate one...
| wonger_ wrote:
| S12E45, Gary Kildall special: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v
| =doOQnc0A3Ek&list=PLmM8tWTshxQB...
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| In case anyone doesn't realise, (nearly) every episode is
| available on the Internet Archive. I was recently involved in
| restoring an additional "lost" episode from a tape found in a
| libarary.
|
| https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles
|
| Why not start with the "Gary Kildall Special":
|
| https://archive.org/details/GaryKild
| pavlov wrote:
| _" "Our father, Gary Kildall, was one of the founders of the
| personal computer industry, but you probably don't know his name.
| Those who have heard of him may recall the myth that he 'missed'
| the opportunity to become Bill Gates by going flying instead of
| meeting with IBM. Unfortunately, this tall tale paints Gary as a
| 'could-have-been,' ignores his deep contributions, and
| overshadows his role as an inventor of key technologies that
| define how computer platforms run today._
|
| _" Gary viewed computers as learning tools rather than profit
| engines. His career choices reflect a different definition of
| success, where innovation means sharing ideas, letting passion
| drive your work and making source code available for others to
| build upon. His work ethic during the 1970s resembles that of the
| open-source community today._
|
| _" With this perspective, we offer a portion of our father's
| unpublished memoirs so that you can read about his experiences
| and reflections on the early days of the computer industry,
| directly in his own voice."_
|
| Sounds really interesting. Thanks for making this available!
| gertlex wrote:
| I just happen to have been reading this past week, the Digital
| Antiquarian's IBM PC release overview (4 parts). This covers
| comparing Gates and Kildall (and includes e.g. the uncertainty
| of what actually happened with that "flying instead of meeting
| with IBM")
|
| Here's the url to part 2 of that 4-parter, where Gary gets
| mentioned (also covered in parts 3 and 4):
| https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-2/
| elzbardico wrote:
| Let's be frank. Gates was from the WASP elites, old money
| stuff. IBM would probably find a reason to give him the deal
| rather than to Gary no matter what.
| acdha wrote:
| In particular, his mother - Mary Maxwell Gates - was on the
| United Way board along with IBM's chairman John Opel and
| reportedly discussed her son's company with Opel a few weeks
| before they made the decision to license MS-DOS.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-
| gates-64-...
| WalterBright wrote:
| There's little doubt that Ms Gates suggested that IBM look
| into Bill Gates, but I seriously doubt that IBM made the
| major business decision to contract with Gates because of
| his mother's suggestion.
| 0xEF wrote:
| So, and correct me if I am wrong, you don't think a
| little old fashioned nepotism happened like it does in
| pretty much every major industry?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Nepotism certainly happens, but companies that practice
| it rarely thrive.
|
| Ms Gates was not associated with IBM.
| acdha wrote:
| None of us know what was said but I have no reason to
| doubt it based on the reports of his subsequent
| conversations with lower-level IBM executives. It
| probably didn't seem like an especially consequential
| decision both because neither Gates nor Kildall were
| especially proven at that time by the standards of a
| Goliath like IBM and the mainframe guys were notoriously
| dismissive of PCs (Opel came up through S/360). I've seen
| enough nepotism not to question the plausibility but it's
| especially easy to imagine people high up the management
| ladder at the biggest mainframe manufacturer thinking it
| didn't really matter which of the toy computer operating
| system vendors they picked. I didn't work in that world
| then (that was my dad's generation) but even in the
| mid-90s when I started working in tech it was not
| uncommon to find mainframe people who were dismissive of
| PC or Unix systems as non-serious.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Ms Gates wasn't on the board of IBM, she was on the board
| of another company. That isn't nepotism.
|
| There is no way successful IBM would commit to Microsoft
| without a thorough vetting.
|
| Few remember, but IBM also sold CPM/86 for the PC.
| Kildall had his chance, and muffed it with the high
| price.
| Tor3 wrote:
| I remember the very high price of CP/M-86. If that was
| because of DRI's pricing and not something IBM did, then
| indeed that made the choice simple, in Kildall's
| disfavour.
| WalterBright wrote:
| As I recall, Kildall thought that CP/M-86 was much better
| than MSDOS, and people would pay the higher price. He was
| unable to make the case, though.
|
| I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not
| better.
| skissane wrote:
| > I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not
| better.
|
| Comparing PC-DOS 1.0 to CP/M-86 1.0, I don't think there
| are huge differences in features - maybe FAT12 is a more
| efficient filesystem; PC-DOS records file sizes to the
| byte, CP/M files are made up of 128 byte records, and
| although there is a filesystem attribute to say how many
| bytes in last record are used (file size mod 128), it has
| to be implemented at the application level; DOS had EXE
| files (wasn't in SCP 86-DOS, was added by Microsoft), I
| think CP/M by then had something similar? Neither had
| directories yet, but CP/M had "user areas" which were a
| kind of limited equivalent.
|
| I think if they'd ported MP/M instead of CP/M (which I
| believe they did later), it would have been a more
| compelling offering-multitasking-but I suppose that would
| have made it even later to the market than it already
| was.
| ndiddy wrote:
| According to the oral history of Tom Rolander (VP of
| engineering at DRI, he was in the famous IBM meeting),
| IBM wanted to call CP/M-86 "PC-DOS" and pay a one-time
| licensing fee, but DRI said they had to keep it as
| CP/M-86 and pay a per-device royalty. About a month after
| the meeting, Rolander heard through the grapevine that
| IBM had licensed QDOS instead of CP/M-86 for their
| operating system. Kildall informed IBM that he was
| already aware of QDOS and was preparing a lawsuit against
| SCP because he believed it to be an illegal CP/M clone.
| To defuse the situation, IBM promised that they wouldn't
| bundle an OS with the PC, would offer PC-DOS, CP/M-86,
| and UCSD P-System alongside the PC, and would pay the
| royalties up front for some large number of copies of
| CP/M-86. The condition was that DRI wouldn't sue IBM or
| Microsoft over the similarities between QDOS and CP/M.
| When the PC was released, Kildall and Rolander discovered
| they had been double crossed:
|
| > So we got the notice about the rolling out and all the
| rest of that, and so as Gary and I were want to do, we
| flew up to San Jose and took a cab over to the IBM store,
| and we came in the store, and sure enough there was the
| IBM PC sitting there, and here were the three boxes of
| the operating system. And we looked at this and the IBM
| PC-DOS was priced at $40, and then over here was CP/M and
| it was priced at I'm pretty sure it was $260. It was more
| than $200 above PC-DOS, and I don't even remember what
| the UCSD P-System was. But we looked at that and I've
| never had my face slapped in my life, but I know what it
| would feel like to have my face slapped. It was such an
| unexpected thing. I mean we had totally assumed that this
| was going to be a level playing field, that PC- DOS was
| going to be priced the same as CP/M, the same as the UCSD
| P-System, and that we were going to let the market, the
| users decide which one, which clearly it wasn't. And Gary
| described that day later on in his memoirs as kind of the
| day innocence was gone.
|
| Here's a link to the full oral history if you're
| interested: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources
| /access/text/20...
| skissane wrote:
| > It was such an unexpected thing. I mean we had totally
| assumed that this was going to be a level playing field,
| that PC- DOS was going to be priced the same as CP/M, the
| same as the UCSD P-System, and that we were going to let
| the market, the users decide which one, which clearly it
| wasn't. And Gary described that day later on in his
| memoirs as kind of the day innocence was gone.
|
| This seems like a rather unrealistic expectation when one
| has per-device royalties and the other hasn't. Of course,
| that probably can't fully explain the magnitude of the
| price difference-which may indeed have involved some
| underhandedness on IBM's part-but a vendor who charges a
| reseller more for a product than its competitor and then
| complains that reseller sells its product for a higher
| price the competitor's, is being a bit silly
| jen20 wrote:
| > There is no way successful IBM would commit to
| Microsoft without a thorough vetting.
|
| As I recall, at the time said commitment was made,
| Microsoft didn't even _have_ an operating system, and
| subsequently bought QDOS! Their original deal was for
| languages.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Gates convinced IBM that he could build one, as he knew
| about QDOS, and immediately went and bought QDOS as a
| base to start with. So, yeah, it was a bit of bluster on
| his part, but he was able to fulfill the contract.
| acdha wrote:
| I specified the United Way to avoid confusion on that
| point. While the word nepotism originated from the
| Italian word for "nephew" referring to popes appointing
| their relatives, in modern English usage it more broadly
| includes friends as well. See for example the OED: "the
| practice among those with power or influence of favouring
| relatives, friends, or associates, especially by giving
| them jobs".
|
| If it helps, pretend that I wrote "cronyism" instead. My
| point was simply that it having a friendly voice at the
| board level is a large potential advantage which was only
| available to one of the vendors. While we cannot prove
| anything which wasn't written down, it seems implausible
| to say it couldn't have affected things - especially in
| an era where personal relationships carried more weight
| and there was less scrutiny of these sorts of things.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| One way to look at it is that if IBM considered licensing
| MS-DOS and CP/M to be equivalent, which is to say either
| one would serve there purposes. Then I can easily see the
| Chairman of IBM putting a finger on the scale to swing it
| toward Ms. Gates son. It's like a two-fer[1], IBM is
| going to do a deal anyway and they figure either OS would
| work, and he gets a 'favor' point from a fellow board
| member who he might someday need their vote on a board
| decision down the road. Politics at that level is all
| about the banking of favors and opportunistically cashing
| them in.
|
| [1] "Two for one" -- two desirable outcomes from a single
| action.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Ms Gates was not on the board of IBM. She was on the
| board of United Way.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| The original comment said they were _both_ on the board
| of United Way. Those are the votes he 'd be curating.
| United Way, at the time, was the largest non-profit in
| the United States and it's mission was to funnel
| donations to "deserving" non-profits. Many companies,
| including IBM, had a payroll contribution you could make
| to United Way. The 'service' United Way provided was
| doing the research to avoid scam charities and non-
| profits. The old joke "I gave at the office" when a
| person comes to your door asking for donations, was in
| reference to giving to United Way and implicitly telling
| the solicitor that if they wanted a donation to go to
| United Way and convince them to give some of the donated
| money to their charity.
|
| As a result, being on the board gave a person tremendous
| soft power by giving them a direct impact on whether or
| not they chose to fund a non-profit. The way that
| expressed would be trips and junkets "for free" for
| United Way board members as a means of attempting to
| persuade them to fund a given non-profit. So let's say
| your kid starts a non-profit and you want other board
| members to advocate for it being funded. You, as the
| parent, have a conflict of interest and so must recuse
| yourself from that decision, but others on the board do
| not. Having someone in that meeting you can count on to
| make a solid case for your kids non-profit is worth a
| lot.
|
| Rich people giving advantages to other rich people is
| frowned upon as collusion and nepotism, but when you
| launder that through a giving non-profit and even better
| you get to use other peoples money, and avoid a whole
| passel of tax implications. Well who is going to complain
| that United Way is funding this non-profit versus
| another? They had so much money to give away it was no
| doubt easy to hide the less well supported donations from
| things like the Red Cross or mothers against drunk
| driving donations.
|
| That's the game at this level.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The Gates family was indeed wealthy, but they were
| nowhere near the kind of wealth that would influence IBM.
| I'm sure Ms Gates was intelligent, well educated, and
| quite charming, but she didn't know anything about
| computers. IBM would have been foolish to let her decide
| their PC division's major decisions.
|
| I.e. I'm not buying the notion that her influence went
| beyond simply suggesting they check into what her son was
| doing.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Ah, I see. I wasn't clear. Let me try this: I don't think
| Ms Gates knew anything about computers and I don't think
| IBM would have picked MS-DOS over a technically superior
| OS. I think 3 things happened:
|
| 1) Mary mentions to John the chairman of IBM that her son
| has a company doing "Computer Stuff" (they were the
| premier BASIC on CP/M at the time, IBM was planning to
| have BASIC in ROM so would have been talking to Microsoft
| about that). John asks the team doing the PC if this
| "micro-soft" has an OS like CP/M or if they are just a
| language company.
|
| 2) The question gets back to Bill who scrambles to say
| "Sure we can do OSes too! we have this thing we're
| calling it, uh, "microsoft disk operating system" MS-DOS
| for short. (while they scramble to secure the rights to
| the OS) I expect Bill had already been talking to Seattle
| Computer Products about selling a version of BASIC on
| their 86-DOS because he was all about the hustle and he
| wanted it to be on every computer. He likely saw the
| opportunity and would have asked about licensing it as a
| product Microsoft could sell.
|
| 3) The PC team finds out that Gates can supply both the
| OS and BASIC and presents to John: "Option A: We can get
| BASIC from Microsoft and CP/M from Digital Research"
| (most popular OS and most popular language), "or option
| B: we can get both BASIC and an OS that is similar to
| CP/M from Microsoft."
|
| I am suggesting, that given that scenario, John could
| have expressed a "preference" (always leave it in the
| hands of the team you delegated the decsion to, to
| decide, but you can express a preference) that they go
| with option B. Putting myself in his seat, I might have
| spun that preference as "Microsoft's OS isn't out there,
| but neither is CP/M for the 8086, and this way we would
| only have to deal with one vendor for software
| integration." All straight up, all above board,
| reasonable argument.
|
| What I'm saying, is that in making that choice, it gave
| John something he could use with Mary, "Hey we're going
| with your son's company for the language and the OS" and
| she would be happy about that. I'm also saying that I
| would not be surprised that had a product person said "We
| going to be fighting headwinds with a microcomputer that
| doesn't run CP/M as that is the one that these small
| businesses are using, we really should go with CP/M-86
| here." And having the chairman push back with "Why don't
| we do this, IBM has a good reputation for its operating
| systems on 'real' computers, we'll take the Microsoft
| product and rebrand it as 'PC DOS' and it will be an IBM
| thing which businesses already trust, how about that?"
|
| Also a reasonable thing to do or choice to make. And it
| worked out for them and Mary appreciated John's support
| in helping her son's business. Which was helpful to John
| as a board member of United way. So two for one, IBM gets
| an OS and John gets a favor credit with Mary.
|
| But I also point out that this is rampant speculation and
| no more accurate than a large language model that uses
| statistical likelihoods to write sentences. :-) The only
| other bit of information I can add is that I was working
| for IBM the summer of 1977 as an intern, and my boss knew
| I was trying to save up enough money to buy a CP/M
| computer so he gave me a secret peak at how IBM was going
| to take over the microcomputer market so maybe I should
| wait. He showed me an unreleased product, the IBM 5100
| running BASIC, it had a built in screen. It was a
| computer by engineers, for engineers, and no one would
| buy anything else :-).
|
| Even young me knew that was not gonna fly :-). But the
| IBM of that time was both predatory (they were being sued
| left and right it seemed) and cheap, and they thought
| they were the smartest people in the world. When I went
| to the PC presentation they gave us in 1981 at USC I
| thought, "Hmm, not a 5100, but a bunch of their own
| software with third party chips." That was very on brand
| for them.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Paul Allen states his version of the IBM selection of OS
| for their IBM PC in his autobiography, Idea Man.
|
| see my comment at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591941 for the
| long version.
|
| Hopefully short version.
|
| IBM went to Microsoft (MS) for languages for the new PC.
| IBM asked if MS could provide an OS. As per unwritten
| agreement, MS told IBM to go to Digital Research (DRI)
| for an OS.
|
| Whatever happened at DRI, IBM didn't get a licensing deal
| for an OS. No OS meant no need for MS languages. When IBM
| complained to MS about not getting a licensing agreement
| for CP/M for IBM PC, one of the MS people suggested Tim
| Patterson's CP/M clone. IBM was outsourcing everything to
| keep away the IBM bureaucracy, so they told MS to handle
| everything.
|
| When MS asked IBM how they wanted to pay for the OS, MS
| gave several options including 1) per copy royalty, or 2)
| flat rate (which turned out to be $40K). For easy
| accounting, IBM chose 2). MS asked to be able to license
| OS to others. IBM said yes. MS didn't really care about
| how IBM paid for the OS, their bread and butter was
| languages. DRI wanted to be paid per copy of CP/M-86.
|
| DRI still didn't have a retail CP/M-86 for IBM PC at
| launch time. By the time they did ship CP/M-86, charging
| much more than PC-DOS1.0, Lotus 123 would launch within a
| few months running on PC-DOS. By the time DRI lowered the
| price for CP/M-86, they were way behind in market share.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I can confirm that IBM has always been cheap in their
| dealings with suppliers. (and in their acquisitions)
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'd trust Allen for being a credible source.
|
| When IBM returned to MS, Gates decided that opportunity
| had dropped in his lap again, and this time he wasn't
| going to turn away from it.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Gates had a version of DOS ready in 6 weeks, while DR was
| still planning DOS. MS got things going much faster.
| rbanffy wrote:
| No. He ran out and acquired 86-DOS, from Seattle Computer
| Products. It's easy to have something when you buy it
| already complete.
|
| And DR had CP/M-86.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Same thing, he did the needful to have something to give
| ibm.
| whobre wrote:
| DRI did not have CP/M-86 at that time which is the reason
| Tim Paterson developed 86-DOS in the first place.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| MS still had to make modifications to Tim Patterson's
| 86-DOS before it shipped as PC-DOS 1.0 - source: Paul
| Allen's Idea Man autobiography.
| alexjplant wrote:
| I wrote a book report on a biography of Bill Gates when I was
| 7 or 8. It contained a youthful anecdote about his mother
| calling him on the house's intercom and him replying after
| several attempts that "[he was] busy thinking. Maybe [she]
| should try it sometime!"
|
| An intercom? In a house? So that your mother didn't have to
| repeatedly yell up the stairs to your brother that food is on
| the table? Sure sounded like rich person stuff to me.
| skibz wrote:
| I wish Gary was one of the people that the average joe associated
| with "people who are known for doing computer things", instead of
| only people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
|
| His accomplishments cannot be overstated:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#Recognition
| 0xEF wrote:
| He was brilliant, but he was not a predator, which is always
| part of the problem. We know names like Gates and Jobs because
| they stepped on the shoulders of others and ate anyone who
| stood in their way alive. History remembers the victors.
|
| That should automatically tell us we shouldn't trust them, and
| yet fandoms and followings abound.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > instead of only people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
|
| At least gates could program...
| senderista wrote:
| At least Jobs could design a product...
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Both of them screwed over early employees wrt company
| shares.
|
| Jobs and Apple board didn't give stock options/shares to
| some early employees, Woz stepped in to make up for some of
| the shortfall. see https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Woz_Plan
|
| Gates argued with Paul Allen about the percentage of
| company ownership. IMHO, Allen didn't like confrontation so
| Allen acquiesced to Gates benefit.
| Rochus wrote:
| (2016)
| Findecanor wrote:
| (2016) I found that I had already downloaded it a year ago but
| never read it.
| lioeters wrote:
| > You can download it here.
| https://www.computerhistory.org/_static/atchm/in-his-own-wor...
|
| ..which leads to a page, with this link at the bottom.
|
| > Download the Kildall Manuscript [2.31MB]
| https://computerhistory.org/blog/computer-history-museum-lic...
| garganzol wrote:
| I read the first part back in 2016 when it was released (spoiler:
| it was worth it). Still waiting for the rest to come, but it
| seems that the Gary's Kildall memoirs project is not being
| pursued.
| whobre wrote:
| Apparently, Gary's children agreed for the entire book to be
| released in 50 years from the partial release. So, only 41
| years now...
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| I'm curious about the part they omitted. I wonder why? But of
| course, it's their business and I'm happy they shared this.
| skissane wrote:
| I am speculating it may be covering aspects of his personal
| life, e.g. describing family conflicts from his perspective-and
| I can understand why his family might not want to air that
| "dirty laundry" in public. Decades from now, many of the people
| who might be hurt or embarrassed by it will be dead, so
| releasing it then wouldn't cause the harm that releasing it now
| might cause
| heymijo wrote:
| Let me give the now defunct Internet History Podcast a shout out.
| Episode 100 - The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates? The Gary
| Kildall Story
|
| A story with intrigue that chronicles the why and how Microsoft
| ended up extracting the most value from the PC revolution instead
| of the hardware makers and of course, why that was DOS instead of
| CP/M.
|
| I liked the oral history nature of this podcast, walking me
| through things that preceded me in technology, and then things
| that I lived through like the 90's internet.
|
| https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2016/03/the-man-who-c...
| profsummergig wrote:
| Kildall may have also invented ghosting.
|
| I remember watching a documentary. IBM officials showed up at
| Kildall's house twice to convince him to sell/license CP/M to
| them. Pre-planned meetings. He ghosted them both times. One of
| those times they waited hours for him.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's a lot of mythology around Kildall and IBM. I'm sure
| some it it even aligns with the facts but I don't put _that_
| much stock in many of the stories and theories.
| WalterBright wrote:
| We'll never know the truth.
| ghaff wrote:
| Past some point, even people with some first-hand
| knowledge may not know the whole truth, filter things
| through their own biases, may just misremember, etc.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My dad kept a diary during his combat tour in WW2.
| Decades later, he read it and was shocked to discover
| that it did not quite line up with his memories.
|
| When I prepared a "history of D" for a paper a while
| back, I went looking through all my documents and emails
| and the D forum history looking to pin things down. I,
| too, discovered that my memories didn't match the facts
| as well as I wished it did.
|
| Memory is a funny thing.
|
| One should always be skeptical of accounts written long
| after the fact. I sometimes wonder how much of our
| written history is false. I support statutes of
| limitations because of this.
| xunil2ycom wrote:
| Lol. I'm sure you're kidding, but let's be clear: he didn't
| invent ghosting. He invented a lot of really cool stuff.
| hackmack10 wrote:
| The kids should not be removing some of their Dad's work. His
| struggles with alcoholism are well defined in the public and him
| describing his struggles could help another facing similar
| problems.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's their call to make. They feel the chapters didn't
| represent their father and, as a draft, I would expect the
| later parts to have been less revised and to be in a rougher
| shape.
| serf wrote:
| >It's their call to make.
|
| Why? Because of possession? That's a crummy reason.
|
| Art is supposed to be upheld as on par with 'divine creation'
| by those that respect it. Literature, being art, isn't
| different.
|
| in other words, we knew the Ecce Homo restoration was botched
| because we were able to compare it to the original piece..
| sadly we won't ever have the luxury of knowing what kind of
| hatchet was taken to the memoir after the author's death.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Why? Because of possession? That's a crummy reason.
|
| Because it their parent.
| acdha wrote:
| I wouldn't say "should not". That's a complex issue and I
| wouldn't say anyone is obligated to put painful moments of
| their personal lives on public display. Any family suffering
| from alcoholism has other examples to learn from, and they
| aren't under any obligation to contribute another one if
| they're uncomfortable doing so.
| serf wrote:
| ABSOLUTELY AGREED.
|
| In fact I think all now-dead authors should have their work as-
| is protected to a fair degree.
|
| Dollars to donuts that the anecdotes revealed something either
| embarrassing or personally connected to the family members,
| it's just easier to posthumously blame the drinker.
|
| I absolutely agree that shining light onto the subject of
| alcoholism is nothing but good for those seeking to avoid the
| horrible problem.
| mdp wrote:
| It's a scanned PDF linked on that page, but someone turned it
| into an epub if that's what you're looking for -
| https://gitlab.com/sigwait/computer_connections/-/releases
| indigodaddy wrote:
| This is perfect, thank you so much. Resolves the text quality
| of the original source!
| achairapart wrote:
| Part 1 was already online since forever. Part 2 however, never
| seen the light. I wonder if it was just undone or because of some
| content in there....
| xunil2ycom wrote:
| This is awesome.
| csense wrote:
| "Glenn came to my tool shed computer room in 1975, so we could
| "adapt" CP/M to the IMSAI hardware. What this means is that I
| would rewrite the parts of CP/M that manage things like diskette
| controllers and CRTs.
|
| Well. come on, I'd already done this so many times that the tips
| of my fingers were wearing thin, so I designed a general
| interface, which I called the BIOS (BASIC I/O System) that a good
| programmer could change on the spot for their hardware. This
| little BIOS arrangement was the secret to the success of CP/M.
|
| With the BIOS in place, a programmer could make CP/M work with
| their specialized hardware. With all those hobbyists out there,
| believe me, there was no shortage of specialized hardware. Glenn
| and I built a BIOS that afternoon and stuck CP/M on an IMSAI. He
| demo'd it to Ed Faber and the IMSAI engineers, and they loved
| it."
|
| Writing a BIOS for a new machine in a single afternoon. Those
| were the days...
| WalterBright wrote:
| In retrospect, MS-DOS was a rather trivial program. Sometimes I
| wonder why I and/or many others did not write an equivalent,
| even just for fun.
| mikewarot wrote:
| FreeDOS is one such program. It comes in quite handy at
| times.
| WalterBright wrote:
| True, but it wasn't usable until 2006, about 20 years too
| late.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Its only a decade and change, not too bad
|
| Many things worked way before that.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There wasn't much of a point in writing a replacement when
| MS-DOS was bundled with your computer. The FreeDOS project
| only got started when Microsoft first announced that the
| then-new Windows 95 would start to move away from MS-DOS and
| people saw the writing on the wall.
| eichin wrote:
| TurboDOS was a contemporary one - had multiprocessing (as in,
| you could have multiple Z80 CPU boards in a single card cage
| that passed messages over a bus) and was delivered as
| linkable objects, so you could customize the OS for your
| hardware (in the multi-Z80 setup, you didn't need _any_ I /O
| that wasn't in the daughterboards, so in this case the tiny
| version of TurboDOS on the daughter boards did the message
| passing thing and talked to the physical serial ports, but
| didn't need a disk driver since the only disk was hooked to
| the single master board. Great (long-lost) stuff - we were
| building an early dialup info-service so each daughter board
| had multiple modems...
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Sometimes I wonder why I and/or many others did not write
| an equivalent, even just for fun
|
| In a sense, every game developer back then wrote a very small
| real-time operating system that dealt with user input, state
| management, screen updates, and audio. I wrote a window
| server (a window-stacker would be more accurate) for the
| Apple II.
| Torwald wrote:
| They did. The GNU project started in 1983.
| skissane wrote:
| > Writing a BIOS for a new machine in a single afternoon. Those
| were the days...
|
| This was not a BIOS in the sense of the PC ROM-BIOS, it was an
| OS module containing device drivers - the equivalent in PC-DOS
| is IBMIO.COM, in MS-DOS it is IO.SYS.
|
| Of course, writing it in an afternoon was still impressive, but
| it was a lot smaller than even the IBM PC ROM-BIOS; the MVP was
| essentially just two device drivers, one for the floppy drive,
| the other for either the screen/keyboard or for the serial port
| (if you used an attached serial terminal for IO). Probably
| IMSAI already had code for those drivers and they were just
| taking that existing code and interfacing it with the CP/M BIOS
| API
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Obviously this is awesome, however a bit tough to read as the
| quality/resolution of the text is pretty low. Wonder if someone
| could clean it up and provide the new file to the hoster? Anyway,
| will try to clean it up for myself/local copy...
|
| EDIT, nevermind someone already did it. The epub looks great:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44603066#44605221
| akasdas wrote:
| Akasdas1234
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| (2016)
|
| I remember reading this when it was released. The "later
| chapters" are missing. No one is perfect, and compared to Gates,
| Kildall is folk hero. The world of computers has no shortage of
| morally bankrupt nutters, some of whom have fallen on absurd
| wealth that insulates them from ever being judged on their
| character. I don't think anyone interested in reading OS history
| is going to judge Kildall on his personal life. It might even be
| a cautionary tale against substance abuse. For me, it is too much
| of a tease to publish a few chapters and withhold the later ones.
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