Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was IBM who set the price. According to Kildall’s right-hand Tom Rolander, they were shocked when they saw the price difference.
> It was IBM who set the price Not what I heard at the time - IBM accommodated what Kildall wanted. Kildall could have sold it separately at a competitive price.
CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
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Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#82The 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.
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.
>It's their call to make.
Why? Because of possession? That's a crummy reason.
Art is supposed to be upheld as on par with 'divine creation' by those that respect it. Literature, being art, isn't different.
in other words, we knew the Ecce Homo restoration was botched because we were able to compare it to the original piece.. sadly we won't ever have the luxury of knowing what kind of hatchet was taken to the memoir after the author's death.
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
One way to look at it is that if IBM considered licensing MS-DOS and CP/M to be equivalent, which is to say either one would serve there purposes. Then I can easily see the Chairman of IBM putting a finger on the scale to swing it toward Ms. Gates son. It's like a two-fer[1], IBM is going to do a deal anyway and they figure either OS would work, and he gets a 'favor' point from a fellow board member who he might some…
Ms Gates was not on the board of IBM. She was on the board of United Way.
The original comment said they were both on the board of United Way. Those are the votes he'd be curating. United Way, at the time, was the largest non-profit in the United States and it's mission was to funnel donations to "deserving" non-profits. Many companies, including IBM, had a payroll contribution you could make to United Way. The 'service' United Way provided was doing the research to avoid scam charities and non-profits. The old joke "I gave at the office" when a person comes to your door asking for donations, was in reference to giving to United Way and implicitly telling the solicitor that if they wanted a donation to go to United Way and convince them to give some of the donated money to their charity.
As a result, being on the board gave a person tremendous soft power by giving them a direct impact on whether or not they chose to fund a non-profit. The way that expressed would be trips and junkets "for free" for United Way board members as a means of attempting to persuade them to fund a given non-profit. So let's say your kid starts a non-profit and you want other board members to advocate for it being funded. You, as the parent, have a conflict of interest and so must recuse yourself from that decision, but others on the board do not. Having someone in that meeting you can count on to make a solid case for your kids non-profit is worth a lot.
Rich people giving advantages to other rich people is frowned upon as collusion and nepotism, but when you launder that through a giving non-profit and even better you get to use other peoples money, and avoid a whole passel of tax implications. Well who is going to complain that United Way is funding this non-profit versus another? They had so much money to give away it was no doubt easy to hide the less well supported donations from things like the Red Cross or mothers against drunk driving donations.
That's the game at this level.
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#84"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.
They did. The GNU project started in 1983.
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
You have an idiosyncratic definition of "compiler" then. Many BASICs, including the MS family of BASICs, did tokenize keywords to save on memory storage.
But 99.9% of people take "compiler" to mean translating source code to either a native CPU instruction set or a VM instruction set. In any tutorial on compilers, tokenization is only one aspect of compilation, as you know very well. And unlike some of the tricky tokenization aspects that crop up in languages like C++, BASIC interpreters simply had a table of keywords with the MSB set to indicate boundaries between keywords. The tokenizer simply did greedy "first token which matches the next few characters" is the winner, and encoded the Nth entry from that table as token (0x80 + N).
When LIST'ing a program, the same table was used: if the byte was >= 0x80, then the first N-1 keywords in the table were skipped over and the next one was printed out.
There were also BASIC implementations that did not tokenize anything; every byte was simply interpreted on every execution of the line. There were tiny BASICs where instead of using the full keyword "PR" meant "PRINT", and "GO" meant "GOTO" etc.
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#86I 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. His accomplishments cannot be overstated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#Recognition
> instead of only people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. At least gates could program...
At least Jobs could design a product…
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#87Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#88Absolutely loved when I randomly caught an episode of Computer Chronicles back in the old time days.
In case anyone doesn't realise, (nearly) every episode is available on the Internet Archive. I was recently involved in restoring an additional "lost" episode from a tape found in a libarary.
https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles
Why not start with the "Gary Kildall Special":
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#89Akasdas1234
Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 talkin…
The parsing, even if line by line as necessary, is still compiling.
In 45 years of writing software, I've never before seen anyone call tokenizing a BASIC program compilation. It's decidedly not common usage.