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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

#111

Post by ndiddy »

Tor3 wrote: post #91
WalterBright wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ms Gates wasn't on the board of IBM, she was on the board of another company. That isn't nepotism. There is no way successful IBM would commit to Microsoft without a thorough vetting. Few remember, but IBM also sold CPM/86 for the PC. Kildall had his chance, and muffed it with the high price.

I remember the very high price of CP/M-86. If that was because of DRI's pricing and not something IBM did, then indeed that made the choice simple, in Kildall's disfavour.

According to the oral history of Tom Rolander (VP of engineering at DRI, he was in the famous IBM meeting), IBM wanted to call CP/M-86 "PC-DOS" and pay a one-time licensing fee, but DRI said they had to keep it as CP/M-86 and pay a per-device royalty. About a month after the meeting, Rolander heard through the grapevine that IBM had licensed QDOS instead of CP/M-86 for their operating system. Kildall informed IBM that he was already aware of QDOS and was preparing a lawsuit against SCP because he believed it to be an illegal CP/M clone. To defuse the situation, IBM promised that they wouldn't bundle an OS with the PC, would offer PC-DOS, CP/M-86, and UCSD P-System alongside the PC, and would pay the royalties up front for some large number of copies of CP/M-86. The condition was that DRI wouldn't sue IBM or Microsoft over the similarities between QDOS and CP/M. When the PC was released, Kildall and Rolander discovered they had been double crossed:

> So we got the notice about the rolling out and all the rest of that, and so as Gary and I were want to do, we flew up to San Jose and took a cab over to the IBM store, and we came in the store, and sure enough there was the IBM PC sitting there, and here were the three boxes of the operating system. And we looked at this and the IBM PC-DOS was priced at $40, and then over here was CP/M and it was priced at I’m pretty sure it was $260. It was more than $200 above PC-DOS, and I don’t even remember what the UCSD P-System was. But we looked at that and I’ve never had my face slapped in my life, but I know what it would feel like to have my face slapped. It was such an unexpected thing. I mean we had totally assumed that this was going to be a level playing field, that PC- DOS was going to be priced the same as CP/M, the same as the UCSD P-System, and that we were going to let the market, the users decide which one, which clearly it wasn’t. And Gary described that day later on in his memoirs as kind of the day innocence was gone.

Here's a link to the full oral history if you're interested: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

#112

Post by rbanffy »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #80
ido wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They arguably fixed it at 3.0, the first truly popular version of windows.

3.11 was the first really decent one.

3.1 was a massive upgrade over 3.0 - it introduced TrueType. 3.11 had peer to peer networking and, at least in Brazil, doomed Netware in the small business segment.

Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

#113

Post by [deleted] »

elzbardico wrote: post #34
pavlov wrote: post #5

"“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 tec…

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.

[deleted]

Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

#114

Post by 8bitsrule »

rbanffy wrote: post #30
zozbot234 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And had no timesharing features at all.

TS was fairly scarce in those times - let alone on PCs. I wonder when the first general-purpose time-share system was available ... outside of mainframes? I know UofM's MECC had MECC Timesharing System (MTS) up on a Cyber73 in 1977 ; before that, their SUMITS had to make do with batch-processing on a FunnyVac.

Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

#115

Post by skissane »

WalterBright wrote: post #109
Tor3 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the very high price of CP/M-86. If that was because of DRI's pricing and not something IBM did, then indeed that made the choice simple, in Kildall's disfavour.

As I recall, Kildall thought that CP/M-86 was much better than MSDOS, and people would pay the higher price. He was unable to make the case, though. I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not better.

> I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not better.

Comparing PC-DOS 1.0 to CP/M-86 1.0, I don’t think there are huge differences in features - maybe FAT12 is a more efficient filesystem; PC-DOS records file sizes to the byte, CP/M files are made up of 128 byte records, and although there is a filesystem attribute to say how many bytes in last record are used (file size mod 128), it has to be implemented at the application level; DOS had EXE files (wasn’t in SCP 86-DOS, was added by Microsoft), I think CP/M by then had something similar? Neither had directories yet, but CP/M had “user areas” which were a kind of limited equivalent.

I think if they’d ported MP/M instead of CP/M (which I believe they did later), it would have been a more compelling offering-multitasking-but I suppose that would have made it even later to the market than it already was.

Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

#116

Post by skissane »

ndiddy wrote: post #111
Tor3 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the very high price of CP/M-86. If that was because of DRI's pricing and not something IBM did, then indeed that made the choice simple, in Kildall's disfavour.

According to the oral history of Tom Rolander (VP of engineering at DRI, he was in the famous IBM meeting), IBM wanted to call CP/M-86 "PC-DOS" and pay a one-time licensing fee, but DRI said they had to keep it as CP/M-86 and pay a per-device royalty. About a month after the meeting, Rolander heard through the grapevine that IBM had licensed QDOS instead of CP/M-86 for their operating system. Kildall informed IBM tha…

> It was such an unexpected thing. I mean we had totally assumed that this was going to be a level playing field, that PC- DOS was going to be priced the same as CP/M, the same as the UCSD P-System, and that we were going to let the market, the users decide which one, which clearly it wasn’t. And Gary described that day later on in his memoirs as kind of the day innocence was gone.

This seems like a rather unrealistic expectation when one has per-device royalties and the other hasn’t. Of course, that probably can’t fully explain the magnitude of the price difference-which may indeed have involved some underhandedness on IBM’s part-but a vendor who charges a reseller more for a product than its competitor and then complains that reseller sells its product for a higher price the competitor’s, is being a bit silly

Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

#117

Post by skissane »

Upvoter33 wrote: post #19

I'm curious about the part they omitted. I wonder why? But of course, it's their business and I'm happy they shared this.

I am speculating it may be covering aspects of his personal life, e.g. describing family conflicts from his perspective-and I can understand why his family might not want to air that “dirty laundry” in public. Decades from now, many of the people who might be hurt or embarrassed by it will be dead, so releasing it then wouldn’t cause the harm that releasing it now might cause

Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

#118

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

(2016)

I remember reading this when it was released. The "later chapters" are missing. No one is perfect, and compared to Gates, Kildall is folk hero. The world of computers has no shortage of morally bankrupt nutters, some of whom have fallen on absurd wealth that insulates them from ever being judged on their character. I don't think anyone interested in reading OS history is going to judge Kildall on his personal life. It might even be a cautionary tale against substance abuse. For me, it is too much of a tease to publish a few chapters and withhold the later ones.

Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

#119

Post by skissane »

csense wrote: post #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 cha…

> Writing a BIOS for a new machine in a single afternoon. Those were the days...

This was not a BIOS in the sense of the PC ROM-BIOS, it was an OS module containing device drivers - the equivalent in PC-DOS is IBMIO.COM, in MS-DOS it is IO.SYS.

Of course, writing it in an afternoon was still impressive, but it was a lot smaller than even the IBM PC ROM-BIOS; the MVP was essentially just two device drivers, one for the floppy drive, the other for either the screen/keyboard or for the serial port (if you used an attached serial terminal for IO). Probably IMSAI already had code for those drivers and they were just taking that existing code and interfacing it with the CP/M BIOS API

Re: CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

#120

Post by alexjplant »

elzbardico wrote: post #34
pavlov wrote: post #5

"“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 tec…

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.

I wrote a book report on a biography of Bill Gates when I was 7 or 8. It contained a youthful anecdote about his mother calling him on the house's intercom and him replying after several ignored attempts that "[he was] busy thinking. Maybe [she] should try it sometime!"

An intercom? In a house? So that your mother didn't have to repeatedly yell up the stairs to your brother that food is on the table? Sure sounded like rich person stuff to me.

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