Gary Kildall

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

by shawndumas • 11 years ago

87 61 11 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

talloaktrees• 11 years ago

I love this video Computer Chronicles: Unix (1985) feat. Gary Kildall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7P16mYDIJw

michaelcampbell• 11 years ago

Even today, years after that show has long since ended, talking about tech that isn't necessarily relevant any more, it is still entertaining and worth watching for anyone interested in the field or its history.

coldcode• 11 years ago

I was on Computer Chronicles back in 1987. He was a cool guy despite missing out on the whole DOS explosion.

davelnewton• 11 years ago

He was one of my childhood programming idols lo those many years ago; cemented after reading the original Programmers At Work.

simplicio• 11 years ago

If nothing else, he was certainly one of the best looking of the early micro-computer pioneers.

smacktoward• 11 years ago

The failure of Digital Research and IBM to reach a deal to bundle CP/M with the original PC provides one of the great "what-ifs" in computing history.

If that deal had been made, Microsoft wouldn't have gotten the big infusion of capital that turned it from a niche vendor into the behemoth it eventually became. Which means Windows, Office, and IE (if they were ever developed at all!) would have had to compete in the marketplace without MS being able to use their monopoly over PC operating systems as a lever to boost them up over the competition. Which in turn means a whole host of products whose names are just footnotes today -- Netscape, OS/2, GEM, TopView, DESQView, DeskMate, GEOS, Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Ami Pro, and on and on and on -- would have had access to the oxygen that could have turned them into the Next Big Thing. Oxygen that Microsoft was only able to deny them because of the muscle the failure of that original deal had given them.

Who knows what the computing world would look like today if that deal had been reached?

delibes• 11 years ago

I imagine an alternate universe where you wrote :

"The failure of Microsoft and IBM to reach a deal to bundle DOS with the original PC provides one of the great "what-ifs" in computing history."

wvenable• 11 years ago

I think the single behemoth is a bit of stable state for computing, especially in those days. So you would end up with just a different behemoth and it could have been worse.

brandonmenc2• 11 years ago

a whole host of products whose names are just footnotes today

Don't forget BeOS!

njloof• 11 years ago

Apple's been doing a credible job of duplicating the features of BeOS in MacOS X, with the help of some key BeOS refugees (notably Dominic Giampaolo).

WalterBright4• 11 years ago

But CPM/86 WAS shipped for the PC, by IBM. When I bought my IBM PC, I had a choice of PC-DOS or CPM/86. I chose the former because it was $40 and the latter was $180 or something like that.

It was the price that killed CPM/86, as nobody could give a reason why someone should pay so much more than for PC-DOS.

vangale3• 11 years ago

Don't forget UCSD Pascal! (Or maybe we should)

ghaff• 11 years ago

Yeah, but it's not clear that given how IBM had cut a deal with Gates and pushed PC-DOS as the default, whether CP/M could realistically have continued as a legitimate alternative with a working business model.

mark-r• 11 years ago

If PC-DOS didn't exist, nobody would have thought twice about the price of CP/M. It was still a small portion of the overall machine price. It's only in the direct comparison, when you realized you were getting less and spending more, that it fell short.

CodeWriter232• 11 years ago

Could have something to do with Microsoft acquiring Seattle Computer DOS for $25,000 vs. Digital Research investing what I imagine is quite a bit more to port CP/M to the 8086.

bryanlarsen• 11 years ago

It's possible that Microsoft would have "offered" to build the BIOS to get its basic in ROM and used control over the BIOS to put itself into the same gatekeeper position. Also Microsoft was a very resourceful, ambitious company, they would still have developed Office. I wouldn't even write off Windows, it could have easily been developed on top of CP/M.

Things could have been very different or they could have been very much the same.

yuhong• 11 years ago

My favorite is actually the OS/2 2.0 fiasco now, given that it involved unethical tactics like Microsoft Munchkins etc., not to mention DR-DOS.

steven2012• 11 years ago

There's no guarantee that CP/M would have maintained its lead. It could have been the case that MSFT didn't just curl up and die but fight and regain the monopoly. Say what you want about Microsoft, but Gates and Ballmer were/are smart and even smarter with business.

donflamenco• 11 years ago

A (the?) big reason Microsoft got the IBM contract was because Bill Gate's mom (Mary Gates) was on the board of United Way with the CEO of IBM at the time (John Opel.)

Bill Gate's parents are impressive on their own rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates "In 1980, she discussed with John Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, her son's company. Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives.

A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer."

wilsynet• 11 years ago

IBM approached Microsoft to provide various software for their PC. Microsoft said they could provide BASIC, but not an Operating System, and helpfully directed IBM to Digital Research. Digital Research passed on the onerous terms (close to free).

IBM went back to Microsoft and said "now what?". Microsoft, fearing they would lose the BASIC deal as well, then purchased the rights to QDOS or 86-DOS (a CP/M clone) for $50,000 from Seattle Computer Products, and did the deal with IBM, agreeing to the onerous terms that Digital Research wouldn't. Which as we all know didn't actually turn out to be very onerous at all.

This is well documented in Triumph of the Nerds.

Mary Maxwell Gates may have provided an introduction, but it was the chutzpah, genius and desperation of Bill Gates that got the deal done.

JoshTriplett2• 11 years ago

A flip side of that: if the IBM/Microsoft deal had been made, the PC clone industry might not have succeeded, so PC might have meant exclusively "IBM PC". Forget about all the products that Microsoft crowded out; what would have happened to the hardware and software industry if a dozen competing "PC" manufacturers didn't spring up?

nsxwolf2• 11 years ago

Maybe a more advanced architecture like the Amiga would have won out.

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

I was under the impression that most of the consumer hardware that has been dominating the scene over the past couple of decades has firmly been dictated by constraints pertaining to IBM PC compatibility. It's only with smartphones and tablets coming in to overtake the microcomputer/PC (though they still have a long way to go until self-hosting and everything) that this is being challenged.

brudgers2• 11 years ago

If Operating Systems had all been a couple of hundred dollars a pop, there wouldn't necessarily have been all the clones on disks and in homes that allowed those companies to be viable...and the actual story of Netscape is quite different from the myth. Netscape enjoyed a multi billion dollar exit and Andreessen is a leading venture capitalist.

Companies go bust. Microsoft didn't kill DEC.

DanBC• 11 years ago

Next Big Thing

WordStar and WordPerfect were pretty big. They were standard requirements for office jobs.

WordPerfect didn't fail because MS had a stranglehold on the industry but because they botched their transition to Windows.

prestonbriggs2• 11 years ago

Before CP/M and such, he was a serious compiler guy who made contributions to data-flow analysis, etc. E.g., http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=512945

prestonbriggs2• 11 years ago

More accessible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-flow_analysis

marktangotango• 11 years ago

Gordon Eubanks worked with Kildall during this time period, he talks about the events surrounding the deal with IBM in this oral history. Fascinating stuff:

http://www.cwhonors.org/archives/histories/Eubanks.pdf

seltzered• 11 years ago

Oddly, I learned about Gary Kildall a few days ago after reading a wired article about the "Halt and Catch Fire" tv series ( http://www.wired.com/2014/05/halt-and-catch-fire/ )

"Easter eggs: Gordon and Donna Clarks’ first initials and back story echo those of Gary and Dorothy Kildall"

fizixer• 11 years ago

Highly recommended (though the Gary Kildall bit is very short):

- A movie: Pirates of Silicon Valley (https://youtu.be/BI-nzUIYIX4)

- A documentary: Triumph of the Nerds (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLudrw8Z7-gFa7Is4YZitO...)

- Not involving Gary Kildall, but about open source, gnu, and linux: Revolution OS: (https://youtu.be/fxjElWL8igo)

acomjean2• 11 years ago

I too would highly recommend Trimuph of the Nerds Documentary (That Cringley Guy is involved in it). Lots of first hand accounts. Plus IBM Carols being sung!

Triumph of the Nerds has some first person accounts from Jack Sams of IBM and Bill Gates and Balmer (of the whole IBM/ Digital Research negotiation (or lack thereoff). Its in part 2 (11 minutes in).

Basically IBM wanting programming languages and an OS from Microsoft. MS didn't have an OS, so they sent IBM to Digital Research (Gary's Company). The deal to get CP/M fell through Microsoft said, we'll sell you (IBM) and OS too. Microsoft then bought the OS from a company across town. That os was basically adapted from CP/M (the author used the cp manual as a starting point)

rmason• 11 years ago

That's not exactly how it happened. IBM already knew about CP/M because it was already powering the non-Apple PC market. Knowing IBM's desire for an OS as well as Basic he sent Steve Balmer across town to license 86-DOS, aka Seatle DOS which became his offering MSDOS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS

IBM eventually offered three different OS on the original IBM PC but Gates shrewdly made sure his was the lowest priced one and the rest is history.

pmelendez• 11 years ago

I second the recommendation although my least favourite was the Revolution OS; It just felt like a propaganda pamphlet to me but still was insighful and entertaining.

bane• 11 years ago

You can watch many of the Computer Chronicles episodes Kildall was in at the Internet Archive. They're simply awesome snapshots of the state of the market at the time.

https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles

And the episode celebrating his life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVqBokd3l2E

webreac• 11 years ago

It seems that IBM is in bad shape because of a non-disclosure agreement. Maybe the lesson should be that NDA are bad.

dribnet• 11 years ago

If you've ever wondered why newlines are sometimes CR and other times CR+LF, I think Gary is part of that answer.

CodeWriter232• 11 years ago

It's because on a terminal, CR moved the cursor to the left column and LF moved the cursor down one line. That was also true for dot matrix printers, and paper-based terminals like a modded IBM Selectric or the DecWriter.

So if you wanted your file to display properly when type'd to the console or pip'd to a printer, you needed CR,LF make it work. LF alone would give you text in a barber pole pattern, and CR alone would give you the last line of a file on a terminal, or a horrible mess of over strike text on a printer.

fit2rule• 11 years ago

Ah, I remember those days. If someone made the mistake of just using CR alone in a big file they spooled to the lineprinter, it sometimes quite literally would halt and catch fire. There was a fire-extinguisher placed next to it for a reason.

mappu• 11 years ago

The article didn't ever mention the second listed spouse, Karen. Apparently he underwent a second divorce after beating her with a pool cue < http://issorp.com/site/umour/garykildall.htm >.

rasz_pl• 11 years ago

If you want to know how was he IRL I recommend watching Computer chronicles. Gary Kildall Special:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdj8gh9GPc4

Whole playlist of episodes, its like watching non-fiction 'Halt and Catch Fire':

https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerChroniclesYT/playlists?...

Gary Kildall

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