"“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"With this perspective, we offer a portion of our father’s unpublished memoirs so that you can read about his experiences and reflections on the early days of the computer industry, directly in his own voice."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!
gertlex · 5h ago
I just happen to have been reading this past week, the Digital Antiquarian's IBM PC release overview (4 parts). This covers comparing Gates and Kildall (and includes e.g. the uncertainty of what actually happened with that "flying instead of meeting with IBM")
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.
acdha · 3h ago
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.
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.
acdha · 39m ago
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.
0xEF · 1h ago
So, and correct me if I am wrong, you don't think a little old fashioned nepotism happened like it does in pretty much every major industry?
xen2xen1 · 1h ago
Gates had a version of DOS ready in 6 weeks, while DR was still planning DOS. MS got things going much faster.
rbanffy · 26m ago
No. He ran out and acquired 86-DOS, from Seattle Computer Products. It's easy to have something when you buy it already complete.
And DR had CP/M-86.
indigodaddy · 4m ago
Same thing, he did the needful to have something to give ibm.
indigodaddy · 6m ago
Obviously this is awesome, however a bit tough to read as the quality/resolution of the text is pretty low. Wonder if someone could clean it up and provide the new file to the hoster? Anyway, will try to clean it up for myself/local copy...
skibz · 5h ago
I wish Gary was one of the people that the average joe associated with "people who are known for doing computer things", instead of only people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
He was brilliant, but he was not a predator, which is always part of the problem. We know names like Gates and Jobs because they stepped on the shoulders of others and ate anyone who stood in their way alive. History remembers the victors.
That should automatically tell us we shouldn't trust them, and yet fandoms and followings abound.
77pt77 · 1h ago
> instead of only people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Absolutely loved when I randomly caught an episode of Computer Chronicles back in the old time days.
rbanffy · 6h ago
I think that, by now, I have watched every episode. He was the Bill Gates we needed.
whobre · 5h ago
He was nothing like BG. Gary was an inventor, educator and most of all a visionary. He hated running a business, even though he started DRI after failing to convince Intel to buy CP/M.
Yes, there are quite a few videos on YouTube about him, named “The man who should have been Bill Gates” but that’s just click baiting. Watch the special episode of “The Computer Chronicles” about Gary Kildall and see what his friends and business associates say about him.
BruceEel · 5h ago
While we are here, another important article by Kildall has been made available online, "Global Expression Optimization During Compilation"-1972 [1] - while the field has obviously moved on, this is still interesting and relevant IMO, if anything it shows what a talented technical writer he was.
Kinda saddens me that society usually aligns with marketing and business mindset (impressing, selling, profiting) instead of people like Kildall. There are many passionated, driven, creative, prolific people with intrisic motivations that are wasted due to commercial forces.
WalterBright · 2h ago
I remember the early IBM PC days. PC-DOS was $40. CPM/86 was $240. Both were available, people simply picked the cheaper one. I used both, and there was nothing better about CPM/86.
Due to inflation, this is like $113 vs $679 today. It was a no-brainer to buy MS-DOS instead. Kildall clearly was a businessman wanting to make money off of it.
whobre · 1h ago
It was IBM who set the price. According to Kildall’s right-hand Tom Rollander, they were shocked when they saw the price difference.
rbanffy · 4h ago
We ended up with the one this society, which usually aligns with business and marketing mindsets, deserves.
In time, we might remake society in a kinder, wiser version of itself. At that time, we might even deserve more Kildalls.
FuriouslyAdrift · 5h ago
Just like Jobs. He was the marketing and sales guy. Woz, et al. were the visionaries and engineers cranking out the product.
rbanffy · 4h ago
Jobs had a key difference from Gates - he had taste. He insisted on the injection molded case for the Apple II instead of sheet metal because he wanted it to look like a finished product. He insisted on not having lines dividing the color bands in their logo, which made it more expensive to print (but much nicer to look at).
Jobs would never let something like Windows 1 escape the lab.
FuriouslyAdrift · 3h ago
He also refused to have fans in the first several models causing a high failure rate...
Form follows function. Just ask Ive.
esafak · 3h ago
Good thing Microsoft fixed it with 2.0!?
terabyterex · 5h ago
This paints Bill Gates as not a tech person and a business first person, which is not true. He got a BASIC compiler on the altair which MITS thought couldn't be done. He helped Wozniak implement a version of BASIC supporting floating point numbers. Gates didn't even want to take Microsoft public. They had to convince him. Ballmer was the biggest businessman in the bunch. Hell, he was the one that suggested kidall since Microsoft wasn't in the OS business.
Upvoter33 · 5h ago
This is mostly true. Gates was a tech wizard - a great programmer before there were even books about programming. But to make it sound like Gates wasn't a business-first guy is wrong - he wanted to sell software from day 1. Read any early bio about him and his speech about selling software to the homebrew club (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists).
zozbot234 · 4h ago
MITS was correct. TinyBASIC is a very different animal from the language for time-sharing minicomputers that was what people actually meant by "BASIC" at the time. For one thing, TinyBASIC was a language interpreter and not a compiler.
rbanffy · 4h ago
And had no timesharing features at all.
rbanffy · 4h ago
> BASIC compiler
Interpreter - an entirely different kind of animal. Microsoft didn't get a BASIC compiler until much later.
> He helped Wozniak implement a version of BASIC supporting floating point numbers.
No. He sold Apple a BASIC, then used it as leverage to prevent Apple from making a BASIC for the Macintosh.
> Ballmer was the biggest businessman in the bunch.
He suggested cutting Paul Allen's family off when Allen was battling cancer.
WalterBright · 2h ago
Um, it is necessary to compile a program before being able to interpret it. I don't know how early BASICs were implemented, but the usual method is to compile it to some sort of intermediate representation, and then interpret that representation.
D's compile time function execution engine works that way. So does the Javascript compiler/interpreter engine I wrote years ago, and the Java compiler I wrote eons ago.
The purpose to going all the way to generating machine code is the result often runs 10x faster.
stevekemp · 52m ago
It is not necessary to compile a program, in the general case, before executing it.
Many programming languages parse their program to an AST then walk that AST interpretting as they go. But for BASIC you can parse/execute statement by statement - no need to parse the whole program ahead of time, and certainly zero need to compile to either machine code or any internal representation.
Remember at the time we're talking about 64k was a lot of RAM. Some machines had less.
eichin · 52m ago
> necessary to compile
Um, no? your experience is probably at least two decades after the time period in question.. The more advanced versions of, for example, the TRS-80 BASIC (part of this "microcomputer BASICs that all share a common set of bugs") did no more than tokenize - so, `10 PRINT "Hello"` would have a binary representation for the line number, a single byte token for PRINT, then " H E L L O " and an end-of-line marker. Actually interpreting the code involved just reading it linearly; GOTO linenumber involved scanning the entire code in memory for that line number (and yes, people really did optimize things by putting GOTO and GOSUB targets earlier in the program so the interpreter would find them faster :-)
EvanAnderson · 46m ago
I was going to post this, but you beat me to it.
It's a VM of a sort, and the p-code the VM executes is tokenized input.
wslh · 4h ago
I recommend reading "Idea Man" [1] by Paul Allen, Microsoft's cofounder, to understand the deep and early involvement he and Bill Gates had with computers.
I also recommend Hard Drive (1992) [2] for a deeper look into the business side of Bill Gates.
Regardless of any negative opinions about him, I believe Bill Gates was/is in a league of his own.
> He hated running a business, even though he started DRI after failing to convince Intel to buy CP/M
This is what uniquely qualified him to bring about a nicer timeline.
Sadly, we got the second rate one...
BruceEel · 6h ago
truth. Too bad we got the other one!!!
csense · 2h ago
"Glenn came to my tool shed computer room in 1975, so we could "adapt" CP/M to
the IMSAI hardware. What this means is that I would rewrite the parts of CP/M that manage things like diskette controllers and CRTs.
Well. come on, I'd already done this so many times that the tips of my fingers were wearing thin, so I designed a general interface, which I called the BIOS (BASIC I/O System) that a good programmer could change on the spot for their hardware. This little BIOS arrangement was the secret to the success of CP/M.
With the BIOS in place, a programmer could make CP/M work with their specialized hardware. With all those hobbyists out there, believe me, there was no shortage of specialized hardware. Glenn and I built a BIOS that afternoon and stuck CP/M on an IMSAI. He demo'd it to Ed Faber and the IMSAI engineers, and they loved it."
Writing a BIOS for a new machine in a single afternoon. Those were the days...
WalterBright · 1h ago
In retrospect, MS-DOS was a rather trivial program. Sometimes I wonder why I and/or many others did not write an equivalent, even just for fun.
eichin · 35m ago
TurboDOS was a contemporary one - had multiprocessing (as in, you could have multiple Z80 CPU boards in a single card cage that passed messages over a bus) and was delivered as linkable objects, so you could customize the OS for your hardware (in the multi-Z80 setup, you didn't need any I/O that wasn't in the daughterboards, so in this case the tiny version of TurboDOS on the daughter boards did the message passing thing and talked to the physical serial ports, but didn't need a disk driver since the only disk was hooked to the single master board. Great (long-lost) stuff - we were building an early dialup info-service so each daughter board had multiple modems...
zozbot234 · 1h ago
There wasn't much of a point in writing a replacement when MS-DOS was bundled with your computer. The FreeDOS project only got started when Microsoft first announced that the then-new Windows 95 would start to move away from MS-DOS and people saw the writing on the wall.
rbanffy · 22m ago
> Sometimes I wonder why I and/or many others did not write an equivalent, even just for fun
In a sense, every game developer back then wrote a very small real-time operating system that dealt with user input, state management, screen updates, and audio. I wrote a window server (a window-stacker would be more accurate) for the Apple II.
mikewarot · 1h ago
FreeDOS is one such program. It comes in quite handy at times.
WalterBright · 1h ago
True, but it wasn't usable until 2006, about 20 years too late.
heymijo · 4h ago
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.
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.
ghaff · 3h ago
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.
WalterBright · 1h ago
We'll never know the truth.
xunil2ycom · 2h ago
Lol. I'm sure you're kidding, but let's be clear: he didn't invent ghosting. He invented a lot of really cool stuff.
garganzol · 5h ago
I read the first part back in 2016 when it was released (spoiler: it was worth it). Still waiting for the rest to come, but it seems that the Gary's Kildall memoirs project is not being pursued.
whobre · 4h ago
Apparently, Gary’s children agreed for the entire book to be released in 50 years from the partial release. So, only 41 years now…
Findecanor · 5h ago
(2016) I found that I had already downloaded it a year ago but never read it.
hackmack10 · 4h ago
The kids should not be removing some of their Dad's work. His struggles with alcoholism are well defined in the public and him describing his struggles could help another facing similar problems.
acdha · 3h ago
I wouldn’t say “should not”. That’s a complex issue and I wouldn’t say anyone is obligated to put painful moments of their personal lives on public display. Any family suffering from alcoholism has other examples to learn from, and they aren’t under any obligation to contribute another one if they’re uncomfortable doing so.
rbanffy · 3h ago
It's their call to make. They feel the chapters didn't represent their father and, as a draft, I would expect the later parts to have been less revised and to be in a rougher shape.
"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!
Here's the url to part 2 of that 4-parter, where Gary gets mentioned (also covered in parts 3 and 4): https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-2/
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...
And DR had CP/M-86.
His accomplishments cannot be overstated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#Recognition
That should automatically tell us we shouldn't trust them, and yet fandoms and followings abound.
At least gates could program...
Yes, there are quite a few videos on YouTube about him, named “The man who should have been Bill Gates” but that’s just click baiting. Watch the special episode of “The Computer Chronicles” about Gary Kildall and see what his friends and business associates say about him.
[1]: https://www.proquest.com/docview/302615627/?fromunauthdoc=tr...
Due to inflation, this is like $113 vs $679 today. It was a no-brainer to buy MS-DOS instead. Kildall clearly was a businessman wanting to make money off of it.
In time, we might remake society in a kinder, wiser version of itself. At that time, we might even deserve more Kildalls.
Jobs would never let something like Windows 1 escape the lab.
Form follows function. Just ask Ive.
Interpreter - an entirely different kind of animal. Microsoft didn't get a BASIC compiler until much later.
> He helped Wozniak implement a version of BASIC supporting floating point numbers.
No. He sold Apple a BASIC, then used it as leverage to prevent Apple from making a BASIC for the Macintosh.
> Ballmer was the biggest businessman in the bunch.
He suggested cutting Paul Allen's family off when Allen was battling cancer.
D's compile time function execution engine works that way. So does the Javascript compiler/interpreter engine I wrote years ago, and the Java compiler I wrote eons ago.
The purpose to going all the way to generating machine code is the result often runs 10x faster.
Many programming languages parse their program to an AST then walk that AST interpretting as they go. But for BASIC you can parse/execute statement by statement - no need to parse the whole program ahead of time, and certainly zero need to compile to either machine code or any internal representation.
Remember at the time we're talking about 64k was a lot of RAM. Some machines had less.
Um, no? your experience is probably at least two decades after the time period in question.. The more advanced versions of, for example, the TRS-80 BASIC (part of this "microcomputer BASICs that all share a common set of bugs") did no more than tokenize - so, `10 PRINT "Hello"` would have a binary representation for the line number, a single byte token for PRINT, then " H E L L O " and an end-of-line marker. Actually interpreting the code involved just reading it linearly; GOTO linenumber involved scanning the entire code in memory for that line number (and yes, people really did optimize things by putting GOTO and GOSUB targets earlier in the program so the interpreter would find them faster :-)
It's a VM of a sort, and the p-code the VM executes is tokenized input.
I also recommend Hard Drive (1992) [2] for a deeper look into the business side of Bill Gates.
Regardless of any negative opinions about him, I believe Bill Gates was/is in a league of his own.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_Man
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp...
This is exactly my point.
> He hated running a business, even though he started DRI after failing to convince Intel to buy CP/M
This is what uniquely qualified him to bring about a nicer timeline.
Sadly, we got the second rate one...
Well. come on, I'd already done this so many times that the tips of my fingers were wearing thin, so I designed a general interface, which I called the BIOS (BASIC I/O System) that a good programmer could change on the spot for their hardware. This little BIOS arrangement was the secret to the success of CP/M.
With the BIOS in place, a programmer could make CP/M work with their specialized hardware. With all those hobbyists out there, believe me, there was no shortage of specialized hardware. Glenn and I built a BIOS that afternoon and stuck CP/M on an IMSAI. He demo'd it to Ed Faber and the IMSAI engineers, and they loved it."
Writing a BIOS for a new machine in a single afternoon. Those were the days...
In a sense, every game developer back then wrote a very small real-time operating system that dealt with user input, state management, screen updates, and audio. I wrote a window server (a window-stacker would be more accurate) for the Apple II.
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...
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.
..which leads to a page, with this link at the bottom.
> Download the Kildall Manuscript [2.31MB] https://computerhistory.org/blog/computer-history-museum-lic...