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

(spectrum.ieee.org)
244 points rbanffy | 2 comments | 18 Jul 25 10:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.428s | source
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heymijo ◴[18 Jul 25 13:32 UTC] No.44604470[source]▶
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...

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profsummergig ◴[18 Jul 25 13:52 UTC] No.44604655[source]▶
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.

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ghaff ◴[18 Jul 25 14:54 UTC] No.44605330[source]▶
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.
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WalterBright ◴[18 Jul 25 16:15 UTC] No.44606451[source]▶
We'll never know the truth.
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1. ghaff ◴[18 Jul 25 18:25 UTC] No.44608162[source]▶
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.
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2. WalterBright ◴[18 Jul 25 18:39 UTC] No.44608301[source]▶
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.