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CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

(spectrum.ieee.org)
244 points rbanffy | 3 comments | 18 Jul 25 10:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.709s | source
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POSSIBLE_FACT ◴[18 Jul 25 11:46 UTC] No.44603645[source]▶
Absolutely loved when I randomly caught an episode of Computer Chronicles back in the old time days.
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rbanffy ◴[18 Jul 25 12:04 UTC] No.44603765[source]▶
I think that, by now, I have watched every episode. He was the Bill Gates we needed.
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whobre ◴[18 Jul 25 12:14 UTC] No.44603845[source]▶
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.

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terabyterex ◴[18 Jul 25 12:50 UTC] No.44604145[source]▶
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.
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1. zozbot234 ◴[18 Jul 25 13:55 UTC] No.44604689[source]▶
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.
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2. rbanffy ◴[18 Jul 25 13:57 UTC] No.44604700[source]▶
And had no timesharing features at all.
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3. 8bitsrule ◴[18 Jul 25 22:14 UTC] No.44610358[source]▶
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.