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

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.

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-...

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.

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?

Gates had a version of DOS ready in 6 weeks, while DR was still planning DOS. MS got things going much faster.

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.

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.

Same thing, he did the needful to have something to give ibm.

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.

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.

Nepotism certainly happens, but companies that practice it rarely thrive.

Ms Gates was not associated with IBM.

DRI did not have CP/M-86 at that time which is the reason Tim Paterson developed 86-DOS in the first place.

Ms Gates was not on the board of IBM. She was on the board of United Way.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I can confirm that IBM has always been cheap in their dealings with suppliers. (and in their acquisitions)

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

> 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

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 ignored 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.

The CP/M-86 wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86 )lists the IBM PC version release date as 1982-04-05, several months after the Aug 12 1981 IBM PC introduction.

According to this wired.com page, https://www.wired.com/2011/08/0812ibm-5150-personal-computer..., IBM had sold 65K PCs in 4 months.

It wasn't a "base to start with". MS Dos was QDOS. I was a summer intern in the early 1980s with IBM in Kingston, NY, and had access to the source. Gates didn't even bother to remove the SCP copyright notice from the comments, nor the references to QDOS. Too bad "sed" and "awk" weren't available for search and replace back then.

Much of the remaining QDOS/PCDOS work was probably adapting to the IBM BIOS.

from Tim Paterson's website, https://web.archive.org/web/20190722012644/http://www.paters...

  ...In May, he went to Microsoft to work full-time on the PC-DOS version of 86-DOS.

  "The first day on the job I walk through the door and 'Hey! It's IBM,' " says Paterson, grinning impishly. "I worked at Microsoft a neat eleven months. In May, June, and July I worked on things I hadn't quite finished, refining PC-DOS."

  International Business Machinations.

  This was the beginning of an eleven-month hurricane. Almost daily, Paterson shipped stuff to Boca Raton for IBM's approval, and IBM would instantly return comments, modifications, and more problems.

  "They were real thorough. I would send them a disk the same day via Delta Dash. IBM would be on the phone to me as soon as the disk arrived." Paterson pauses and winds up. He's remembering one request that clashed violently with his view of the project.

  "IBM wanted CP/M prompts. It made me throw up." But when IBM asks, you comply if you're a lowly programmer, and that is what Paterson did.

  He finished PC-DOS in July, one month before the pc was officially announced to the world. By this time, 86-DOS had become MS-DOS.