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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: 0.003s | source
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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"With this perspective, we offer a portion of our father’s unpublished memoirs so that you can read about his experiences and reflections on the early days of the computer industry, directly in his own voice."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!

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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.
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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-...

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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.
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acdha ◴[18 Jul 25 17:32 UTC] No.44607549[source]▶
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.
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WalterBright ◴[18 Jul 25 18:26 UTC] No.44608178[source]▶
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.

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Tor3 ◴[18 Jul 25 19:31 UTC] No.44608865[source]▶
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.
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1. WalterBright ◴[18 Jul 25 21:30 UTC] No.44610057[source]▶
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.

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2. skissane ◴[18 Jul 25 22:25 UTC] No.44610452[source]▶
> 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.

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3. canucker2016 ◴[18 Jul 25 23:53 UTC] No.44611148[source]▶
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.