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."
He couldn't have been Bill Gates... (Score:3, Insightful)
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This. Gates was ruthless from the get-go, the kid read multiple biographies of Napolean for chrissakes. He read biographies of people like JP Morgan, back when you couldn't even find them without trekking to a major university library.
If Kildall had struck an exclusive deal with IBM, he would've probably made a few tens of millions USD before retiring or being out-maneuvered by businessmen of Gates' caliber.
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And a few millions USD is an immense amount of success!
The best recognition.. (Score:5, Insightful)
We could use more like him. To be recognized by IEEE is great, but greater still to leave this legacy to his kids and the community.
Re:The best recognition.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I think its wrong to put him in the Jobs, or Gates category. Jobs and Gates where merely better than average technical people but with phenomenal business skills. Kildall was only a better than average businessman but with phenomenal technical skills.
In a sense he was more a Wozniak character, well meaning, technically brilliant, and for a while at least betting on the right horse.
And by all accounts, a genuinely decent person.
Re:The best recognition.. (Score:5, Interesting)
To tie them all together, I used a computer for many years that was designed by Woz, marketed by Jobs, with a expanded processor and memory made by Gates' company to run Kildall's OS (and a few others). An Apple ][+ with the Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard card, running CP/M. And I'm sure I wasn't the only one. A world capable of inventing, manufacturing, and garnering capital and sales to see that innovation become available to people requires all of them.
I know I'd rather have lunch with the likes of Wozniak and Kildall, however. Add Ritchie and Kernighan, and that would be one heck of a table.
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Thats same machine is responsible for all the success I've had in my career as a technologist. It was outrageously expensive at the time but parents say it's the best investment they ever made.
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I don't see any evidence that Kildall was a better than average businessman. In fact, the evidence is that he was quite a poor business man.
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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.
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He was actually fantastic, and made serious coin doing something people actually originally thought impossible, writing software.
Unfortunately he just wasn't shrewd enough to face down Bill Gates, possibly the most talented businessman of the last 50 years. But I doubt many else could either. Bill even managed to wipe the floor with Jobs (You'll note when Jobs finally d
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.
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I think you may have misunderstood the parent's assertion. I think he meant that Wozniak owed whatever wealth and business success he achieved to riding Jobs' coattails.
Ironically, I completely agree with your remark that, without Wozniak, Jobs "probably would have ended up as a used car salesman". (Although even then, he probably would have wound up a billionaire). Unfortunately, due to the way our society is structured, it is NOT the geniuses who are rewarded but the people, like Jobs, who exploit their i
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Woz probably still would have managed some sort of success without Jobs. As for Jobs, I'm not so sure he would be a billionaire otherwise. Jobs was very good at the position he was in, but he was very fortunate. Personalities like his are much, much more likely to self-destruct than succeed.
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Yes, it's kind of a very lucky virtuous circle that leads to great wealth and success. You need Woz (the brains), but without Jobs (the huckster) Woz would, at best, get a decently paid job working for some corporation. Likewise, Jobs on his own couldn't strike it rich without some big breakthrough that comes only from a technical guy like Woz. So they both need each other; but when the alchemy happens and the money rains down, 99.99% of it sticks to the huckster.
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Wait, there are non-evil flowcharts? What an eye-opener.
Oh right? What was I thinking? I don't know anything about CP/M, but I do know that flowcharts are the purest evil. Unless there are doughnuts. Did the man know his doughnuts?
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Uh NO. Fuck Gary and his idiotic 8.3 filename convention -- it set computing back 20 years.
My old Apple DOS 3.3 filesystem had 30 character filenames WITH spaces in it.
ProDOS had even 15-character filenames and directories.
CP/M was total shit.
I met Gary (Score:2)
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Your post is a bunch of crap. Forensic computer scientists looked at the MS-DOS source code and compared it to CP/M code back during the Digital Research trial and verified that it was not stolen. And your rant about that second grade university student (second grade? WTF?) is obviously a pile of shit.
I know it's trendy to hate Microsoft (Old Microsoft, not to be confused with New Microsoft), but you can do it with actual facts instead of made up bullshit.
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To think, that'a probably the most intelligible part of that verbal diatribe.
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OMG that was an amazing list of lies and half truths and bullshit.
There is one reason MS is where it is today. *WE* put them there. We demanded it because they were the cheaper solution. Before MS put TCPIP in windows 98 you paid for it (in some cases as much as the OS itself). Take for example OS/2 (of which MS contributed large amounts to). If you wanted a TCP/IP stack for it from IBM you paid upwards of 30k per box. The bundling of IE was not a matter of 'oh should they'. It was a matter of everyo
Re: I met Gary (Score:5, Insightful)
The cheap solution was the rest of the market beyond Apple and IBM. It wasn't the platform with the IBM trademark associated with it. The PC initially exploited it's association with the original IBM product and then Bill Gates and Microsoft ran with it from there once they already had commanding position in the market due to someone else's trademark.
Microsoft is ultimately the extension of someone else's monopoly.
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The open architecture of the IBM PC was what made it a success. Virtually everything else was more closed. I mean, IBM published the commented ASM source code for the PC BIOS in the Techref Manual that anybody could buy. They used only common off the shelf chips. Once the cloners started duplicating the design (after enough people wrote clone BIOSes) there was no turning back.
You're right, though, that the cheap alternative was the cheap plastic junk with 8 bit processors, and proprietary ASICs that consume
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The open architecture of the IBM PC was what made it a success. Virtually everything else was more closed.
Say what? Every micro of the era came with schematics!
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The cheap solution was the rest of the market beyond Apple and IBM..
Yes, and everyone seems to have forgotten Compaq etc
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.
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> Before MS put TCPIP in windows 98 you paid for it (in some cases as much as the OS itself). Take for example OS/2 (of which MS contributed large amounts to). If you wanted a TCP/IP stack for it from IBM you paid upwards of 30k per box.
That is complete nonsense. Trumpet Winsock was available for Windows 3.x as inexpensive shareware. Apparently most used it for free but you can rectify that at http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/
Windows 95 had TCP/IP, initially in the Plus! pack (which was usually instal
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We demanded it because they were the cheaper solution. Before MS put TCPIP in windows 98 you paid for it (in some cases as much as the OS itself).
Or you used an OS that wasn't missing critical network functionality like Linux.
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DOS vs CPM
Windows vs OS2
PC vs Apple
VHS vs Beta
44 khz CD vs SACD
NTSC vs PAL
18 khz subcarrier FM vs discrete stereo
jpg vs png
mp3 vs FLAC or ALAC
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Straight out of alt.conspiracy.jfk, and other similar newsgroups.
Thanks for the entertaining read.
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First of all, you are off-topic.
Secondly, MS is dead. Nobody gives a rat's ass about MS anymore. The big scary, and potentially much more dangerous, companies these days are FB, Google and Apple. So yeah, 90's called and they need their "hate the MS" thing back.
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Which episode and story were you in CC? I loved watching that show. Matt Chat had a interview with Stewart recently that I mentioned in my /. post: http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org] ... :)
Open Source (Score:3)
Doesn't the open-source movement go back to the 1970s? Admittedly, I'm not sure how easy it would be to get involved with open-source projects (other than open-sourcing your own private projects) before the age of the internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... [wikipedia.org]
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It was hard enough in the '90 from across town. It took me over a week and that was only because a kindly sysop granted an exception to the ul:dl ratio.
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If it was only a couple meg, you were missing most of the distro. No wonder you thought it was a POS.
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That's what cheapbytes.com was great for, back in the days of dialup. You could order a CD and have it delivered faster than downloading the contents. I just went to see if their site was still there. It doesn't seem to be coming up.
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It looks like they just went poof. Their domain is still registered but DNS seems to be down.
The BBB says they are believed to be shut down.
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It's a pity for nostalgic reasons, but not really unexpected. They had a great service back when network bandwidth was hard to come by.
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Yeah, fast internet pretty well eliminated their reason to be. I have a few CDs from them on my shelf. I keep them around as a curiosity.
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1994 was the year I first installed Linux. By that point, there were a number of complete Linux distributions. I got my start with Slackware 2.0.
So he was definitely around for the open source movement, so to speak. It was off most peoples' radar screens in 1994. This site got its start in 1997. I think I joined in 1998.
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Doesn't the open-source movement go back to the 1970s?
In the '80s, I recall myself and others being more focused on initiatives for Open Systems Interoperability and Connectivity.
Award (Score:1)
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IMO, CP/M should get him the award, not even considering BIOS...
While Tandy TRS-DOS was my first OS, CP/M on Vector Graphic, Kaypro and Televideo systems was the first one I dove into. In the BDOS I could disassemble memory to instructions and actually figure out what was going on. CP/M was the 8-bit bread and butter of the 8080/Z80 age.
In 1980 at age 16 I wrote a proof of concept product, a TSR (terminate and stay resident') program for CP/M systems called DataCrypt. You'd load it on startup and be prompted for a pass phrase and it would hash the phrase, tuck itself i
Comment removed (Score:3)
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and a rival company claims he ignored the IBM reps and 'went flying'. Its not true, but Gates claims that it is.
IBM went to Microsoft and Gates for an operating system and programming languages for their new micro --- and Gates sent them on to Kildall.
Various reasons have been given for the two companies failing to reach an agreement. DRI, which had only a few products, might have been unwilling to sell its main product to IBM for a one-time payment rather than its usual royalty-based plan. orothy might have believed that the company could not deliver CP/M-86 on IBM's proposed schedule, as the company was busy developing an implementation of the PL/I programming language for Data General. Or, the IBM representatives might have been annoyed that DRI had spent hours on what they considered a routine formality [a non disclosure agreement.
Kildall obtained a copy of PC DOS, examined it, and concluded that it infringed on CP/M. When he asked Gerry Davis what legal options were available, Davis told him that intellectual property law for software was not clear enough to sue. Instead Kildall only threatened IBM with legal action, and IBM responded with a proposal to offer CP/M-86 as an option for the PC in return for a release of liability. Kildall accepted, believing that IBM's new system (like its previous personal computers) would not be a significant commercial success. When the IBM PC was introduced, IBM sold its operating system as an unbundled option. One of the operating system options was PC DOS, priced at US$40. PC DOS was seen as a practically necessary option; most software titles required it and without it the IBM PC was limited to it's built-in Cassette Basic. CP/M-86 shipped a few months later at $240, but sold poorly against DOS and enjoyed far less software support.
Gary Kildall [wikipedia.org]
CP/M-86 was cut-priced down to $60 by 1983. Too late,
When popularity rules (Score:2, Interesting)
Democracy, markets and social groups all recognize one factor: popularity.
When popularity rules, engineering comes second. What matters is making a product that many people think they need.
Gates isn't even a huge offender here. He accomplished something great: he made a company to standardize computing.
Thanks to him, we have standard hardware, file formats, disk drives, etc. enabling a lot of things including Linux.
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I smell a troll
Re:When popularity rules (Score:4, Funny)
I smell a troll
Take a shower.
Eternal September (Score:1)
Pre-Eternal September:
"Oh look, an outlier opinion. It's either genius or not worth commenting on."
Post-Eternal September:
"Someone who disagrees with me. I need to call him a corporate shill, a troll, a pedophile or a racist and then I've won this debate in my own mind and social group."
About time (Score:2)
Gary's contributions in the early days of microcomputing were very significant. Few have contributed nearly as much.
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The entire series was donated to The Internet Archive [archive.org] I find it awesome watching the old episodes to see how far we came. Seeing laptops that boast about a fantastic battery life of 2 hours with an *OMG* color screen or seeing a Panasonic rep saying about how the 3DO will kill Nintendo is a great nostalgia trip.
I remember him for GEM (Score:5, Interesting)
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Apple sued all the early GUI interfaces out of business. You might even say they caused Microsoft's success with Windows, by clearing the field for them.
well, he said it was a weekend hack (Score:5, Insightful)
I met him back in the 70s. He said that CP/M was something he hacked up one weekend out of frustration with other things available at the time or rather the dearth of much of anything. He wasn't at all impressed by having done so. He wondered why people thought it was a big deal.
So sorry to hear that we lost him and so very young.
"a certain age," eh? (Score:1)
My memories of Digital Research (Score:2)
A Navy laboratory project I was on wanted to buy the source code to MSDOS for a project where we needed to make some custom mods. Digital Research said they were interested, but their lawyers made it living hell. Somehow the Navy lawyers and DR's lawyers finally hammered out an agreement (I remember one of the provisions was that we would never, ever, EVER tell anyone that they had sold the code to us), but it took so many months that we had by then written most of what we needed from scratch, so we decided
Comment removed (Score:3)
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you have no idea what the internet is, do you?
Kildall was amazing; Chuck Moore & others too (Score:2)
http://www.businessweek.com/st... [businessweek.com]
http://www.groklaw.net/article... [groklaw.net]
http://www.basicallytech.com/b... [basicallytech.com]
http://www.digitalresearch.biz... [digitalresearch.biz]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
"The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smo
Matt Chat's Interviews With Stewart Cheifet! (Score:2)
3/Three Long Parts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
They talked about Gary briefly. I don't re(member/call) which one(s) had that discussion. Just watch/listen to all of them if you were a fan of Computer Chronicles like me. ;)
Photographs of Kildall plaque dedication (Score:1)
Gary was always very helpful (Score:1)