Fifty years of the personal computer operating system

https://computerhistory.org/blog/fifty-years-of-the-personal-computer-operating-system/

by jnord • 2 years ago

126 65 2 years ago

"IBM wished to purchase CP/M outright, whereas DRI sought a per-copy royalty payment in order to protect its existing base of business. The meeting ended in an impasse over financial terms, but Gary believed they had essentially agreed to do business.

Kildall tried to renew the negotiations a couple of weeks later. IBM did not respond because, in the meantime, Bill Gates purchased an OS from Seattle Computer Products that was written to emulate the look and feel of CP/M. He then sold a one-time, non-exclusive license to IBM, which used the designation PC DOS. With great foresight, he retained the right to license the product to others as MS-DOS."

[...]

"IBM announced the PC on August 12, 1981, but with the PC-DOS list price set at $40 versus $240 for CP/M, most customers simply chose the former as the lower-cost option."

And the rest... is computer history...

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft)

JohnClark1337• 2 years ago

I've heard 3 different versions of this story now. 1. Gary was out joyriding in his plane and when the reps from IBM showed up, his wife turned them down because she didn't feel like she had the authority to continue negotiating without him

2. IBM reps showed up, but it was Gary's wife's birthday, and so he told them he would need to reschedule

3. This version

I wonder if we will ever really know what took place that day.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

IBM did not respond because, in the meantime, Bill Gates purchased an OS from Seattle Computer Products that was written to emulate the look and feel of CP/M. He then sold a one-time, non-exclusive license to IBM...

Yeah. It's incredible how IBM handed the golden keys to the castle on a plate cut in a solid 100000000 carat diamond to Microsoft.

This has to be the absolute worst business deal ever made in history: 3 trillion market cap for Microsoft. And IBM created that.

smallstepforman• 2 years ago

That is debatable. The PC clone business made the IBM PC the industry “standard”, since it opened up the supplier list to many companies. IBM alone (eg. PS2 and OS/2) as a sole manufacturer did not manage to conquer the world. And MS had the insight to offer DOS to everyone. MS really won because they were cheaper than alternatives (eg Berkeley GeOS, CP/M, Unix) until critical mass was established. Even if FreeBSD was available in mid 80’s, it would have become the “standard” today. Cheap and good enough always wins the day. Proprietary and expensive makes you 2nd best.

WillAdams2• 2 years ago

Even without that, Bill Gates would have created something --- Microsoft did a _lot_ of custom development, e.g., the Tandy-Radio Shack Model 100 (which was the last bit of coding which B.G. did for production) and developed and licensed a lot of other products.

He also made his share of deals which took a lot of value away from other companies on his own:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

(buying MacBasic from Apple for $1 so as to kill it contine the MS-Basic license for the Apple II)

An interesting insight into this timeframe is Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp: A Silicon Valley Adventure_

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup

the whole "embrace, extend, extinguish" thing shows up as documented by folks feeling its effects.

achairapart• 2 years ago

The story was not so linear, though. These new 16 bit machines (8080 & 8086) were useless without an OS. They needed it badly and fast.

86-DOS/PC-DOS/MS-DOS was born as a kind of throw-away OS to fill this hole temporarily. Microsoft was betting hard at the time on another OS called Xenix, which was Unix-based!

Then, somehow the industry decided that DOS was good enough, it lasted ~15+ years and this made Microsoft a fortune.

In the end, Bill Gates saw a business opportunity and acted quickly and ruthlessly. Gary Kindall, on the other hand, delayed the initial CP/M-86 development for too long.

By an irony of fate, Gary Kindall spent the rest of his career anticipating and innovating software concepts (Multiuser, Multitasking, Graphics Environment Manager, even the first encyclopedia on CD-ROM, ten years before MS Encarta) but somehow the timing was always wrong and all this never marked the return of the first CP/M glory days.

Gary Kindall was the greatest PC software pioneer, and as the old saying goes: “Pioneers take the arrows, settlers take the land”.

wglb3• 2 years ago

Yeah. It's incredible how IBM handed the golden keys to the castle on a plate cut in a solid 100000000 carat diamond to Microsoft.

In all fairness, very few recognized at the time what that would lead to.

IBM had a deep, entrenched culture that had serious dominance over all computer business. There was not an article during that time that didn't characterize the business as "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs" where IBM was of course Snow White. Everyone else was essentially looking for crumbs. A similar example was illustrated in David Halberstam's The Dead Reckoning where General Motors was so dominant and culturally resistant to any new ideas from the outside that visitors from Japan were allowed to meet with the executives, but no discussions of the auto industry were allowed.

So in the eyes of the IBM leadership, this was a tiny, goofy idea that would not amount to much. One leader at IBM scoffed at the PC-DOS O/S calling it a toy.

Well, it was a toy that essentially ate your world.

timbit42• 2 years ago

It's interesting that Gary was working for Intel when he created CP/M and Intel wasn't interested in it. Then IBM chose the Intel 8088 for their PC. Intel could have offered CP/M to IBM if they'd kept it.

flohofwoe2• 2 years ago

I don't think anybody at IBM (or anywhere else) had an idea how successful the PC would eventually become, it needed many happy accidents for that to happen (and Microsoft was probably more responsible for that success than IBM, the other factor being cheap clones).

The original IBM PCs were thoroughly unimpressive, even when compared to much cheaper 8-bit home computers.

It was much more likely that the PC would have gone the way of the Dodo like most other computer architectures of that time.

layer8• 2 years ago

that was written to emulate the look and feel of CP/M.

And that’s how DOS and then Windows ended up with “/” as the command-line option indicator and therefore “\” as the directory separator.

fanf2• 2 years ago

I used to believe that too, but https://lobste.rs/s/rar1ec/rust_security_advisory_for_standa...

I looked at some CP/M manuals from around 1980 and the commands mostly did not have options. The closest was PIP which put options inside [ ] and there was no / nor \ to be seen.

ok123456• 2 years ago

CP/M didn't have directories until 3.0, which was released in 1983. DOS didn't have them until 2.0.

The backslash was chosen because the forward slash was used for arguments. This convention was taken from other timesharing operating systems of the day.

lproven2• 2 years ago

False. Not true, never was.

Here's the real story:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-bac...

richard_shelton• 2 years ago

I hope someone will write an article about Gary Kildall's achievements in theory of compilation. For us, compiler writers, he is a legendary figure.

wglb3• 2 years ago

I have a copy of his paper at U of W titled "A Code Synthesis filter for basic block optimization" 72-3-01. The code behind the paper was written in XPL.

wglb3• 2 years ago

Further, his work in that area is referenced in other compiler-related books such as Flow Analysis of Computer Programs by Matthew S. Hect.

cmrdporcupine• 2 years ago

Interesting, I've followed topics about Kildall for years but never knew about this. Cool.

EDIT: referenced paper is here: https://haoxintu.github.io/files/1-A%20Unified%20Approach%20...

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

$100 (base OS + bare bones devtools) + $90 (for having the confort of Macros) + $75 (debuging beyond text output) + $75 (for a proper code formatter) = $340 in 1978.

Which are around $1,628.73 in today's money, plus hardware costs, so no wonder that many of us would just stick with the base install and make do with what was available.

Example, I never had an Assembler for Timex 2068, rather painfully translated opcodes into DATA segments, or used a hexdump editor that appeared in some computer magazine as one of those type-in examples.

zwieback• 2 years ago

Yes, stuff was ridiculously expensive back then. I was lucky that my dad bought an Apple ][ for home use but none of my friends could afford anything like that. All our software was pirated or we wrote it ourselves. I have fond memories of my youth in the 8 bit era but this is the golden age of home computing, right now, and it keeps getting better.

musicale5• 2 years ago

my dad bought an Apple ][ for home use but none of my friends could afford anything like that

Apple's pricing hasn't changed that much. ;-)

Introductory price: US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,530 in 2023)

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II

ghaff4• 2 years ago

Basically, dabbling in PCs used to be really expensive relative to today. ((The details matter of course) but basically a PC and software in the early eighties was many thousands of dollars in today's money.

justin662• 2 years ago

An awful lot of other expenses were a lot cheaper, so computer stuff wasn't quite so extravagant for a working person to splurge on as it might seem. The defining characteristic of early users was curiosity, not wealth.

nsguy4• 2 years ago

Sinclair ZX-80 was $625 in today's prices when it was released in 1980. Not too crazy.

EDIT: You could get an assembler/dis-assembler for the ZX-81 for $20 (1982). Also at the time a lot of software was "shared" between enthusiasts.

bombcar• 2 years ago

It was expensive if you were at the forefront; but things were changing so fast that if you were willing to be back a few years, or a "unfavored" style, you could get in quite cheap.

That really accelerated around '95 or so with Windows 95 - anything that couldn't run it became almost free overnight.

musicale5• 2 years ago

I never had an Assembler for Timex 2068

I had never heard of the Timex 2068 before, but apparently it was a variant of the ZX Spectrum. Could it really run CP/M (in addition to BASIC and Spectrum games?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068

uticus6• 2 years ago

"Together with his invention of the BIOS (Basic Input Output System), Kildall's operating system allowed a microprocessor-based computer to communicate with a disk drive storage unit and provided an important foundation for the personal computer revolution." (IEEE milestone plaque cited in article)

The whole idea of an OS as an important thing is debatable. For example:

The operating system is another concept that is curious. Operating systems are dauntingly complex and totally unnecessary. It’s a brilliant thing that Bill Gates has done in selling the world on the notion of operating systems. It’s probably the greatest con game the world has ever seen.
An operating system does absolutely nothing for you. As long as you had something—a subroutine called disk driver, a subroutine called some kind of communication support, in the modern world, it doesn’t do anything else.

(Chuck Moore, interview in "Masterminds of Programming", 2009)

xnorswap• 2 years ago

That sounds like nonsense. The idea that a stable API provides no value is contrary to all the evidence.

Look at graphics APIs like DirectX and look at what happened when jQuery was released for more evidence that having a stable API that covers disparate collections of hardware (or browser) APIs, provides vast amount of value.

The idea that an operating system providing a stable API over different computers is something that doesn't provide value is hogwash.

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

It's more than just a stable API across different computers, though that's a huge deal. It's also code that I don't have to write. I don't have to write the disk drivers. I don't have to write the keyboard driver. I don't have to write the mouse driver. I don't have to write the screen driver. I can build what I'm trying to build on top of that, without worrying about all of that detail.

toast0• 2 years ago

An operating system provides those things, but it's not the only way they could be provided.

Disk drivers could be provided by BIOS/UEFI (and they are) or through some library, or through standard hardware interfaces (AHCI and similar). Same deal for graphics.

Does that need to be bundled with a kernel and a bunch of other stuff? Not strictly. All that other stuff is valuable too, most of the time. Otoh, if you're using the whole computer for one thing, the OS can get in the way, and often isn't providing much you couldn't get as libraries.

uticus6• 2 years ago

The idea that a stable API provides no value is contrary to all the evidence.

...agreed

Look at graphics APIs like DirectX and look at what happened when jQuery was released for more evidence that having a stable API...provides vast amount of value.

I wonder if more correct to say the concept of virtual machine provides a vast amount of value - like Java saying "run everywhere."

But your examples (DirectX, jQuery) could also prove a different point: high levels of abstraction layers lead to maintenance and efficiency nightmares. For example, jQuery sits on JavaScript, sits on browser's engine, sits on OS, sits on microcode. A jQuery-focused dev would still spend a significant amount of time setting up, debugging, accommodating, and troubleshooting things on all the other layers compared to just getting things done in their (somewhat) stable jQuery ABI. The layers are helpful sometimes, and hurtful sometimes, and the net gain is not always as great as expected.

hmry• 2 years ago

This works great as long as you have exactly one program running on your computer and fully trust its developers to not mess up your hardware or lose your data.

uticus6• 2 years ago

I think this is the biggest argument for an OS. The OS is a virtual Nanny or representative of yourself. It does what you would do if you could control the machine: provide security for data, keep code from running through fences, and ensure multiple simultaneous routines don't block each other.

flohofwoe2• 2 years ago

This sort of protection is not a requirement for an operation system though. For instance AmigaOS had full pre-emptive multitasking, device drivers, a windowing UI, a filesystem and all sorts of user-facing features expected of a modern operating system.

But it had no memory protection, no "kernel mode" or filesystem access rights, the hardware was fully documented and accessible to all code running on the machine.

Each program could easily take over the entire machine and do literally anything (including destroying all your data).

Multi-user capability and the idea that a user only has limited access to the computer was really a mainframe thing that leaked into personal computing during the 90s.

djur• 2 years ago

Chuck Moore's alternative to the modern OS is Color Forth. The man is brilliant and he is also a crank in the way brilliant people can sometimes be. When he says "you" he's really referring to programmers (and he's still wrong about that). I don't think the category of "non-programmers who use computers" is a significant part of his analysis.

bregma• 2 years ago

Interesting. Remember when, in order to run a DOS application, you had to edit a config file to tell it which graphics card, sound card, serial port, and printer you had? Also, tweak the jumper on the hardware to select which IRQ they used to avoid conflicts?

That was because your application booted the OS out and ran on naked hardware. It was as simple as IRQ 1-2-3, plus Hercules, SoundBlaster, ExpressCard and extended or expanded RAM. And maybe typing ATDT to get the modem's attention.

uticus6• 2 years ago

I think you're confusing what an OS provides with the concept of configuration maintenance, esp "plug and play." Or to make my point more clearly, all the configuration you listed still must be done for an OS by something outside the OS - ie the bootloader (GRUB, etc) or device manager or the like. An OS doesn't magically make configuration for different hardware unnecessary; indeed it doesn't even handle such configuration.

... and ran on naked hardware.

Not quite, drivers are still involved. An OS may load drivers, expose a facade for drivers, or even abstract whole layers of driver subroutines. But it isn't like it's a choice of either OS or bitbang the hardware.

nsguy4• 2 years ago

DOS had nothing to do with graphics and sound. All that was at the application level. DOS provided the command line (your shell), the filesystem, and a few basic abstractions. Generally speaking applications didn't boot the OS out since they still used it to access files etc.

musicale5• 2 years ago

I seem to recall someone, perhaps Alan Kay (or another person familiar with Smalltalk, Lisp, etc.), saying something like "operating systems are only necessary when your programming language/environment is deficient; ideally you shouldn't have one."

I'm unsurprised that Moore, who invented his own complete-machine programming environment, would concur.

xkriva11• 2 years ago

"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." -- Dan Ingalls

thecodeboy• 2 years ago

For those who don't know, Gary Kildall was also a presenter in the PBS TV show "Computer Chronicles". [1]

I've been enjoying watching episodes of this show I found on YouTube. [2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Chronicles

[2] https://m.youtube.com/@ComputerChroniclesYT

guyzero• 2 years ago

Headquartered in Pacific Grove? Wild. The alternate history of Silicon Valley being the Salinas Valley instead of Santa Clara valley.

krallja• 2 years ago

Silicon Valley is so named because of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Intel.

Shockley moved from NJ to Palo Alto in 1956 to care for his ailing mother.

nsxwolf• 2 years ago

The article mentions Gary died in an accident, which I recall reading elsewhere was that he fell and hit his head in a brawl at a biker bar.

jetrink• 2 years ago

Seattle Times: Computer Pioneer's Death Probed -- Kildall Called Possible Victim Of Homicide
Kildall was injured at the Franklin Street Bar & Grill on July 8 but refused medical treatment. He was taken to a hospital the following day and released. But he was readmitted Sunday and died the following day.
Kildall could have died either from a blow to the head or from hitting his head as he fell, said Sollecito.
The first description of the incident at the bar, he said, was that Kildall had been in the bar between two to 20 minutes. Then witnesses "turned around, and he was on the floor," the sergeant said.
But Sollecito said stories are changing. "That version isn't going to hold up," he said.

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19940716&slug...

The source of that story seems to be the Monterey Police Department, but nothing came of the investigation.

Fifty years of the personal computer operating system

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