←back to thread

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

(spectrum.ieee.org)
244 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 18 Jul 25 10:22 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
pavlov ◴[18 Jul 25 12:12 UTC] No.44603830[source]▶
"“Our father, Gary Kildall, was one of the founders of the personal computer industry, but you probably don’t know his name. Those who have heard of him may recall the myth that he ‘missed’ the opportunity to become Bill Gates by going flying instead of meeting with IBM. Unfortunately, this tall tale paints Gary as a ‘could-have-been,’ ignores his deep contributions, and overshadows his role as an inventor of key technologies that define how computer platforms run today.

"Gary viewed computers as learning tools rather than profit engines. His career choices reflect a different definition of success, where innovation means sharing ideas, letting passion drive your work and making source code available for others to build upon. His work ethic during the 1970s resembles that of the open-source community today.

"With this perspective, we offer a portion of our father’s unpublished memoirs so that you can read about his experiences and reflections on the early days of the computer industry, directly in his own voice."

Sounds really interesting. Thanks for making this available!

replies(2): >>44604091 #>>44605235 #
elzbardico ◴[18 Jul 25 14:46 UTC] No.44605235[source]▶
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.
replies(4): >>44605296 #>>44606938 #>>44610302 #>>44610993 #
acdha ◴[18 Jul 25 14:51 UTC] No.44605296[source]▶
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-...

replies(1): >>44606388 #
WalterBright ◴[18 Jul 25 16:10 UTC] No.44606388[source]▶
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.
replies(3): >>44606933 #>>44607549 #>>44608148 #
ChuckMcM ◴[18 Jul 25 18:24 UTC] No.44608148{3}[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>44608255 #
WalterBright ◴[18 Jul 25 18:34 UTC] No.44608255{4}[source]▶
Ms Gates was not on the board of IBM. She was on the board of United Way.
replies(1): >>44608432 #
ChuckMcM ◴[18 Jul 25 18:53 UTC] No.44608432{5}[source]▶
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.

replies(2): >>44608918 #>>44609122 #
WalterBright ◴[18 Jul 25 19:37 UTC] No.44608918{6}[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>44609326 #
1. ChuckMcM ◴[18 Jul 25 20:17 UTC] No.44609326{7}[source]▶
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.