This is awesome.
CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
41–50 of 151 posts
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#42Let 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…
Kildall may have also invented ghosting. 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.
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.
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
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.
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.
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sin…
> 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 A…
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.
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#45"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...
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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-...
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.
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#47"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 cha…
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.
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kildall may have also invented ghosting. 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.
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.
We'll never know the truth.
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#49"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 cha…
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.
FreeDOS is one such program. It comes in quite handy at times.
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#50"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 cha…
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.
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.