Gary Kildall, Father of the PC OS, Finally Gets His Due 99
theodp writes: "GeekWire reports that Gary Kildall, the creator of the landmark personal computer operating system CP/M, will be recognized posthumously by the IEEE for that contribution, in addition to his invention of BIOS, with a rare IEEE Milestone plaque. Kildall, who passed away in 1994 at the age of 52, has been called the man who could have been Bill Gates. But according to Kildall's son, his dad wasn't actually interested in being what Bill Gates became: 'He was a real inventor,' said Scott Kildall. 'He was much more interested in creating new ideas and bringing them to the world, rather than being the one that was bringing them to market and leveraging a huge amount of profits. He was such a kind human being. He was always sharing his ideas, and would sit down with people and show flowcharts of what he was thinking. I think if he were around for the open-source movement, he would be such a huge proponent of it.' Techies of a certain age will also remember Gary's work as a co-host of Computer Chronicles."
Re: I met Gary (Score:4, Informative)
Actually OS/2 WARP and even 2.1 included TCP/IP. The OS/2 Warp TCP/IP suite was far better than anything Microsoft had. It was basically based on BSD along with many of the tools that were supplied. I remember buying NFS for OS/2 (there were versions from IBM and Hummingbird) as well as X11 for OS/2 (before XFree86 was ported to it). Later versions of OS/2 included even more features from BSD, including sendmail and the firewall support. I remember being able to telnet into my OS/2 box long before such things were supported by Microsoft. When OS/2 Warp shipped, TCP/IP was an add-on for Windows 95.
TCP/IP was never a 20-30K option at least from version 2.1 and later.
Re:The best recognition.. (Score:3, Informative)
From the linked BW article: "Kildall ultimately sold his company to Novell Inc. (NOVL) in 1991 for $120 million." Not BillG money, but not too shabby.
Re:Nice guys (Score:4, Informative)
Wozniak did not ride Steve Jobs coattails. Do you think jobs would have gotten anywhere without Woz at the beginning? He probably would have ended up as a used car salesman.