Mail Archives: opendos/2000/11/09/12:20:58
Hi,
I guess some of you already know this 1997 article, but it
is probably new to most of us not living in the States...
(I would have published the link but it seems to have changed
over the years...)
Enjoy!
Matthias
----------------------------------
GARY KILDALL AND COLLEGIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Dr. Dobb's Special Report, Spring 1997, by Michael Swaine
------*****------
In the early days of the personal-computer revolution, the atmosphere
at those shoestring startup companies with names like "Golemics" and
"Loving Grace Cybernetics" was often more academic than businesslike.
This collegiate ambiance touched everything, from the ways in which
decisions were made and respect allocated, right down to sophomoric
pranks and styles of dress.
There's a fairly obvious reason for this, or at least for some of it:
Microcomputers were a new field, ripe for rapid advances, and that's a
situation that fits neatly into a collegial atmosphere in which
information is openly shared. When discoveries are freely shared, it's
easier to build quickly on those discoveries; conversely, when
progress is rapid, there is less reason to hold onto yesterday's
discoveries. This natural synergy between rapid progress and
information sharing is one key factor in the spectacular growth in the
use and acceptance of computers over the past 20 years. It's one of
the reasons that the personal- computer revolution really has been a
revolution.
In time, companies like Apple and Microsoft would emphasize this
synergy, explicitly calling their corporate headquarters "campuses."
Even today, computer hardware and software companies often have a lot
of the look and feel of grad school. But this predilection for a
collegial atmosphere predates Apple and Microsoft. And while it didn't
start there either, it was nowhere more evident in the early days than
at one of the first personal-computer software companies-Digital
Research. Digital Research could hardly have been anything but
collegial: The company that gave personal computers their first
operating system was the brainchild of a perpetual academic and born
teacher. His name was Gary Kildall.
<SEATTLE>
Gary Kildall seemed fated to be a teacher. His uncle would later claim
that it was what Gary had always wanted. Teaching certainly was in his
blood: The Kildall family actually owned and operated a small college.
More precisely, it was a school for the teaching of navigation, based
in Seattle, Washington. The Kildall College of Nautical Knowledge, the
family called it; it was founded in 1924 by Gary's grandfather. Many
Kildalls taught or worked at the school, including Gary himself, for a
while, after graduating from high school.
But he had decided that year that he was going to be a math teacher,
so he enrolled at the University of Washington. Newly married to high-
school sweetheart Dorothy McEwen, he buckled down and applied himself
to his studies, trying to put a childhood of mediocre grades, fast
cars, and pranks behind him.
Somewhere along the way to a math degree he got hooked on computers.
On finishing his degree, Gary went on to graduate school in computer
science.
He was still headed for a career in teaching, only now it would be
teaching computer science at one of the few colleges that had programs
back then. But there was a hitch. He had joined the Naval Reserve,
and it was the '60s, with the Vietnam war in full flower. The Navy
gave him a choice: Go to Vietnam or take a faculty position at the
Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Gary thought about it for a microsecond and chose Monterey. Even when
the Navy told him what to do, the answer was the same: Teach.
<MONTEREY>
It was in Monterey that Gary created CP/M, the program that brought
him success and that became the unquestioned standard operating system
throughout the microcomputer industry. CP/M was a good product and
deserved, for many technical reasons, to be the standard. But getting
there first always helps, too. And CP/M actually appeared a year
before the first commercial microcomputer arrived on the scene.
Unlike operating systems before and since, CP/M was not the result of
years of research by a team of software engineers. It was, like most
software of its time, the invention of one individual. That
individual was Gary Kildall, and if chance put Kildall in just the
right place at just the right time, you would have to say, in
retrospect, that chance chose well. As it did with Bill Gates, chance
spoke to Gary Kildall through a note on a college bulletin board,
college bulletin boards apparently being the Schwabb's Drug Store of
personal-computer fame.
The note talked about a $25 "microcomputer," a pretty good deal even
at 1972 prices. It was actually describing not a computer but the
first microprocessor, the 4004 that Ted Hoff had designed at Intel.
Presumably, this note was an advertisement torn from a recent issue of
*Electronics News*. Intel had hired Regis McKenna to write the ad at
Hoff's urging. Hoff was convinced that techies would see the virtue of
this new device, this general-purpose processor, and urged that it be
advertised, extravagantly but not altogether inaccurately, as a
"microcomputer." This would make it absolutely clear that it was not
just another limited-purpose device, but something fundamentally
different. Hoff was sure that engineers and programmers would get it.
Kildall got it, literally, sending off his $25 for one of the first
Intel 4004 chips.
It was 1972. Kildall was busy teaching computer science at the United
States Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. He and Dorothy (and son
Scotty) had moved into a house in neighboring Pacific Grove. The
Seattle natives loved this scenic coastal town, with its laid-back,
fog-draped ambiance. The place suited the easy-going professor.
Whether in class or among family and friends the lanky, shaggy-maned
Kildall spoke with the same soft voice, the same disarming wit.
Although he was teaching at a naval installation, he wouldn't have
been out of place on any college campus in his customary sport shirts
and jeans. When he had a point to make he would often cast about for
chalk or a pencil; he was an incurable diagram drawer.
Gary was happy in his marriage, happy to be living by the ocean, happy
not to have gone to Vietnam, and most definitely happy in his job. He
loved teaching, and the work left him time to program. Nothing in his
life was preparing him to run a business, to handle a spectacularly
successful software company supplying the essential software for
hundreds of different computer models in an industry running wild.
Everything argued for his staying right where he was forever, teaching
and programming. At first, the 4004 seemed to fit in with that
scenario.
Gary started writing programs for the 4004. His father, up at that
little navigation school in Seattle, had always wanted a machine that
would compute navigation triangles. Gary made that his project,
writing some arithmetic programs to run on the 4004, thinking idly
that he might come up with something that his father could use. He was
really just fooling around with the device, trying to see how far he
could push it, and with what speed and accuracy.
Not all that far, he soon learned. The 4 in 4004 meant that the device
dealt with data in 4-bit chunks-less than a character. Getting
anything useful done with it was a pain, and performance was pitiful.
Although he was frustrated by the limitations of the 4004, he was
fascinated by what it promised. Early in 1972 he visited Intel and was
surprised to see how small the microcomputer division (dedicated to
the 4004 and the new 8008) was: The company had set aside only a few
small rooms for the entire division. Gary and the Intel microcomputer
people got along well, though, and he began working there as a
consultant on his one free day a week. He spent months programming the
4004 in this day-a-week mode until he "nearly went crazy with it." He
realized-and it was a radical idea fo time-that he would never go
back to "big" computers again. Which is not to say that he stopped
using "big" computers. With both the 4004 and the significantly more
powerful 8008 that he soon moved on to, he was doing his development
work on a minicomputer, much as Bill Gates and Paul Allen did later in
writing software for the breakthrough MITS Altair computer. Like Paul
Allen, he wrote programs to simulate the microprocessor on the "big"
minicomputer, and used this simulated microprocessor, with its
simulated instruction set, to test the programs he wrote to run on the
real microprocessor.
But unlike Gates and Allen, Gary had the benefit of a development
system, essentially a full microcomputer spun out around the
microprocessor, so he could try out his work on the real thing as he
went along. In a few months he had created a language implementation
called "PL/M," a version of the mainframe language PL/I that was
significantly more sophisticated than Basic.
<THE LAB>
As partial payment for his work, Gary received a development system of
his own, which he immediately set up in the back of his classroom.
This allowed him to combine his new obsession with microcomputers and
his love of teaching. The system in the back of the classroom became
the Naval Postgraduate School's first-if not the world's first-
academic microcomputer lab.
And academic it was. This was not just Gary's toy; he used it to teach
students about the technology, and encouraged them to explore it. His
curious students took him up on it, spending hours after class
tinkering with the machine. When Intel upgraded this Intellec-8 from
an 8008 to its new 8080 processor and gave Gary a display monitor and
a high-speed paper tape reader, he and his students were working with
a system comparable to -favorably comparable to-the early Altair
computer before the Altair was even conceived.
Gary realized, though, that he was missing an essential ingredient of
a really useful computer system-an efficient storage medium. In the
early '70s, paper tape was one of the standard storage media, along
with the infamous punched card. Neither was very efficient, and the
issue was particularly critical on microcomputer systems because the
relatively slow microprocessors couldn't offset the inherent slowness
of the mechanical process of punching holes in pieces of paper.
IBM had recently introduced a new storage medium that was much faster
and more efficient. It was based on the existing technology of
recording data as patterns of magnetization on large rapidly spinning
disks, a medium that had everything going for it except price. But IBM
engineers figured out how to scale down this technology to something
smaller and more affordable, creating the floppy-disk drive.
One $5 floppy disk held as much data as a 200-foot spool of paper
tape, and a floppy-disk drive could be had for around $500. The
combination of the microprocessor and the floppy disk drive meant
that, in Kildall's words, "It was no longer necessary to share
computer resources." In other words, the elements of a personal
computer were at hand. Well, most of the elements. Gary soon found
that some important components were still annoyingly missing.
By this time, an industry was developing to create these floppy-disk
drives in volume, and Shugart was the pioneer of this industry. Once
again, Gary traded some programming for some hardware, getting himself
(and the microcomputer lab) a Shugart disk drive. But for the disk
drive to work with the Intellec-8, another piece of hardware was
needed, a controller board that fit in the Intellec-8 and handled the
complicated communication between the computer and disk drive. This
piece of hardware, unfortunately, did not exist.
Gary tried his hand more than once at building the controller. When
that proved more challenging than he expected, he explored the idea of
using a different magnetic medium-ordinary audio tape, mounted on a
conventional tape recorder. His efforts in interfacing a tape recorder
with the Intellec-8 were no more successful than his efforts to build
a disk controller. It soon became clear that his considerable
programming expertise was no substitute for the hardware knowledge
needed to build a device that would connect the Intellec-8 with an
efficient storage device.
It is worth noting that Kildall was well ahead of his time: When MITS,
IMSAI, and other companies began marketing microcomputers, they began
with paper-tape or magnetic-tape storage. It would be several years
yet before disk drives came into common use on microcomputers.
Finally, in 1973, admitting hardware defeat, Gary turned to an old
friend from the University of Washington, John Torode. Torode would
later found his own computer company, but in 1973, he was just doing a
favor for his old friend. "John," Gary said, "we've got a really good
thing going here if we can just get this drive working." Torode got
the drive working.
<ENTREPRENEUR>
Meanwhile, Gary found himself involved with another hardware engineer
on another microprocessor-based project. This project, for all its
apparent frivolousness, was the first hint of any genuine commercial
ambitions on the part of Gary Kildall. The project was the ill-fated
Astrology Machine.
Ben Cooper was a San Francisco hardware designer who had worked with
George Morrow on disk systems and later would, like Torode, start his
own computer company, Micromation. In the early '70s, he thought he
could build a commercially successful machine to cast horoscopes, and
he enlisted Gary's help.
The business was not a success-"a total bust," Gary later called it.
Still, the Astrology Machine gave Gary the first field test of several
programs he had written and rewritten over the past months: a
debugger, an assembler, and part of an editor. He also wrote a Basic
interpreter that he used to program the Astrology Machine. Since, for
Gary, there was little distinction between his academic work and his
commercial or consulting work, he passed on the tricks he came up with
to his students.
He passed the tricks he came up with in writing the Basic interpreter
on to a young naval officer named Gordon Eubanks (today, president and
CEO of Symantec). All the programs, with the exception of the
interpreter, became part of the disk operating system he was writing
to control the controller that Torode was building.
<CP/M>
As they worked on the hardware and software to make the computer and
disk drive work together, Kildall and Torode traded thoughts on the
potential of these microprocessors. Neither of them thought that the
computer system in the back of Gary's classroom would have a very
large market. Microprocessors, they thought, as most everyone at Intel
itself thought, would see their chief use in smart consumer devices,
like blenders and carburetors. Kildall and Torode did see a small
market for development systems like the Intellec-8, but only among the
engineers who would be designing and developing those smart blenders
and carburetors. This view was fostered by Intel management. In fact,
Intel's top brass was even more conservative about the potential
market for the devices than Kildall. When Gary and some Intel
programmers wrote a game that ran on the 4004 and suggested that Intel
market it, Intel chief Bob Noyce vetoed it. The future of
microprocessors was elsewhere, he told them; "It's in watches."
When Intel passed on marketing the game, Gary wasn't fazed. He more or
less agreed with Noyce about the market. But when the company turned
down a piece of software closer to Gary's heart, he began to think
that he might have a better sense of the value of microcomputer
software than the powers-that-be at Intel.
When Torode finished the controller, Gary polished the software to
control it. This was a disk operating system, the first such for a
microcomputer, and Gary called it CP/M, for "Control Program/Monitor"
or "Control Program for Microcomputers." He presented it proudly to
Intel and suggested a reasonable price for it: $20,000. Intel passed.
The thinking, apparently, was that the target market for Intel
development systems was people like Gary, and since Gary had written
some impressive software for the 4004, 8008, and 8080 without an
operating system, clearly an operating system was not necessary for
the target market. Not $20,000 necessary, anyway. Intel did buy Gary's
system programming language, PL/M, but not CP/M.
Gary had been doing his consulting and development work under the name
"MAA," or "Microcomputer Applications Associates." MAA (that is,
Kildall) completed CP/M in 1974. It was a spartan system, containing
only what was essential. It was also remarkably simple, reliable, and
well suited to the limited microcomputers of the day. Gary believed in
CP/M, and if Intel didn't want it, he was sure there were a lot of
hardware hackers and engineers who would. He could sell it himself.
<DRI>
Gary might have been content to run a small ad in the back of one of
the electronics magazines, maybe putting a note on that bulletin
board. What actually ensued was a little more ambitious. At Dorothy's
urging, the Kildalls formed a corporation. Gary would do the
programming and Dorothy would run the business. She started using her
maiden name, McEwen, so she wouldn't be seen as just "Gary's wife."
They incorporated, dropping the MAA name and calling their corporation
"Intergalactic Digital Research Inc." This was later shortened to
Digital Research Inc. And they started selling CP/M.
It was the beginning of the personal-computer revolution. (Everything
Gary had been doing up to then was prerevolution.) The Altair had been
announced, and a flock of other startup companies were starting work
on microcomputers, usually kits but sometimes assembled systems, some
with a paper tape interface but many with no satisfactory provision
for data storage. They needed disk drives, and they needed a disk
operating system.
In those days, there was no model for software pricing, so Digital
Research's first customers got some pretty good deals. When Tom
Lafleur came to them wanting a license for his company, GNAT
Computers, Dorothy gave him unlimited rights to use CP/M as the
operating system on any product his company produced, for a whopping
$90. Within a year the price had gone up by a factor of 100.
The deal with IMSAI in 1977 was the turning point, and Dorothy knew
it. Until 1977, Digital Research was, like most of the industry,
little more than a hobby. And until 1977, IMSAI had been purchasing
CP/M from Digital Research on a single-copy basis. But IMSAI, with its
grandiose plans to sell thousands of floppy-disk-based microcomputers
for use in businesses, wanted to restructure the deal. Marketing
director Seymour Rubenstein (later of WordStar fame), a shrewd
negotiator, haggled with Dorothy and Gary, ultimately arriving at a
license fee of $25,000. Rubenstein gloated. He felt that he had
virtually stolen CP/M from them. He respected Kildall's programming
expertise, but thought the Kildalls were babes in the woods when it
came to business. Perhaps they were, but the Kildalls' perspective was
a bit different. After the IMSAI deal, Digital Research was a real,
full-time business. The IMSAI deal also solidly established
CP/M as the standard, and other companies followed IMSAI's lead in
licensing it. CP/M quickly became and remained so solid a standard
that, until IBM introduced a personal computer, Digital Research faced
no serious competition.
And the programmers who would provide that competition were still
working at MITS in Albuquerque.
<SUCCESS>
After the IMSAI deal, Digital Research began to grow rapidly.
Although it wasn't a financial necessity, Gary continued to teach at
the Naval Postgraduate School for years after the founding of DRI. DRI
itself felt very academic. Relationships tended to be collegial, the
atmosphere casual, discussions animated and cerebral. Or not so
cerebral: The atmosphere sometimes was less like a college classroom
than a college dorm. Gary liked to rollerskate through the halls, and
once conducted an employee interview in a toga.
The staff was young, eager and deeply loyal.
"Gary built a campus in Monterey," Alan Cooper would later remember.
DRI "was collegial in every respect." It was only when the company
didn't function like a college that Gary got frustrated. Employees
would come to him expecting him to solve business problems, marketing
problems, personnel problems. He didn't know the answers; didn't
really want to think about the problems. What he wanted to do was
write code. "Code was his element," Cooper says.
So he wrote code, keeping out of the business end of things as much as
possible. He improved CP/M, making it more portable. Certain features
of the program were logically independent of the hardware, while
others were intimately dependent on the exact features of the machine
the program was running on. Gary shrewdly carved out the smallest
possible set of machine-dependent elements, and made them easily field
customizable. The result was that DRI could write one version of CP/M,
and hardware vendors, field engineers, or whoever could customize it
to their particular hardware configuration. This approach would be
reinvented years later as the "hardware abstraction layer," but Gary
had it down cold in 1978.
Even his second-in-command was-let's not mince words-a total code
geek. Tom Rolander was exactly the sort of person Gary liked to have
around him: just a kid in a candy store when it came to programming,
without a business bone in his body. There weren't many business-
boned bodies at DRI. But the company did have the operating system
that you pretty much had to run on your computer system. It had the
market because it had the technology.
DRI didn't actually have the entire market. In the early '80s, the
Apple II was the largest-selling machine that did not run CP/M, but it
was also the largest-selling machine, period. The base of software for
CP/M systems was large and growing, and Microsoft, seeing an
opportunity, made an uncharacteristic move into hardware: It developed
a SoftCard for the Apple II that would let it run CP/M. Then it
licensed CP/M from DRI to sell with the SoftCard. Soon Microsoft was
selling as much CP/M as DRI.
<DOUBTS>
Gary had moments of doubt about whether this was what he wanted to be
doing with his life. In one of the darkest of those moments in the
late '70s, Gary passed the parking lot by on his way in to work, and
continued around the block, realizing that he just couldn't bring
himself to go in the door. He circled the block three times before he
could force himself to confront another day at DRI.
Later, in frustration, he offered to sell the company to friends Keith
Parsons and Alan Cooper. Parsons and Cooper were running one of the
first companies to deliver business software for microcomputers, a
kitchen-table startup named "Structured Systems Group." Gary was fed
up with all the pointless games and distractions of business. They
could have the whole operation for $70,000, he told them. As for him,
he would go back to teaching.
It was a dream: There was no way it would have happened. Keith and
Alan had little hope of coming up with $70,000, and Dorothy would
never have okayed the deal. Dorothy's self-taught business skills
would be sorely tested in the near future, but in the late '70s, she
knew well enough that the Kildalls had something worth a lot more than
$70,000 in DRI. By 1981, it was obvious to the dullest wit that she
was right: In that year, there were some 200,000 microcomputers
running CP/M, in more than 3000 different hardware configurations, a
spectacular testament to the portability that Gary had designed into
CP/M. That year, the company took in $6 million.
Digital Research employed 75 people in 1981 in various capacities. It
had come a long way since its inception only seven years earlier in
Gary and Dorothy's house.
That was also the year that IBM announced its plan to build a personal
computer.
The story has been told often-and variously-of how Digital Research
lost the IBM operating-system contract to Microsoft, and how this made
Microsoft's success. It had a big impact on DRI, too.
<MULTITASKING>
From that point on, DRI was going in several directions at once. DRI
was one of the first personal-computer companies to seek venture-
capital funding to go public. The VCs were willing, but insisted that
strong management be brought in to get the business under control.
Gary was thrilled by the idea of bringing in someone on whom he could
unload all the annoying business decisions. John Rowley got that job.
Gary quickly disappeared into the fold of Tom Rolander and the
developers, and was rarely seen elsewhere. In particular he was rarely
seen with John Rowley.
Personable, bright, enthusiastic, Rowley nevertheless struck some
around him as just a bit unfocused. He was routinely late to meetings,
and he called a lot of them. If there was an overall strategy to his
actions, it wasn't obvious. Sometimes, one employee later recalled, he
forgot to pay his bills-his own bills, that is-and dunning letters
would find him at work. He was boundlessly enthusiastic, but as
company direction shifted from week to week, the optimism got old
quickly.
But Rowley may very well have been doing the best anyone could under
the circumstances. The circumstances being that the company remained
Gary's company, and actions Gary took or authorized could drive the
company into one market or another. And did.
Gary wrote a version of the programming language LOGO for his son
Scott.
He just thought it would be a cool thing and that Scott could learn
about programming and logic from it. Then he handed it to Rowley,
saying, what should we do with this? And that was how DRI LOGO became
a product. Tom Rolander was fascinated with the Apple LISA (the slo-ow
predecessor to the Mac), and set one up in his office. He messed with
it for quite a while, but nothing ever came of that. Fortunately. Gary
was also intrigued by the LISA/Mac user interface, and began exploring
that realm. The company's focus was supposed to be operating systems,
but the result of Gary's interest in user interfaces was that one of
the many varieties of CP/M then under development got sidetracked into
a user-interface shell that would sit atop an operating system. That
was "GEM," a Mac-like UI for non-Mac computers. Apple thought it was a
little too Mac-like and threatened to sue, and DRI caved. It couldn't
have been lost on Gary that Microsoft, which also had a Mac-like UI
called "Windows," did not (then, at least) get sued.
The company was making lots of money at first, but it was also making
some serious mistakes. Not keeping customers happy was one of the
worst.
DRI in the early '80s occupied a role similar to Microsoft in the
'90s:
Everybody depended on it and resented it for that. But DRI just
wasn't sufficiently responsive to customer complaints and requests.
Alan Cooper blames Gary. When anyone would tell Gary that he ought to
add a particular feature, "Gary would try to argue you out of it." He
didn't want to pollute good code with kludged-on features. The PIP
command exemplified his attitude. In CP/M, you "Pipped" to drive B
from drive A; in MS-DOS, you "Copied" from A to B. Gary thought that
there was nothing wrong with using the command PIP to copy, and that
any halfway intelligent person could master the concept that you
copied (or pipped) from right to left. Bill Gates let people do it the
way they wanted. "That difference in attitude," Cooper says, "is worth
twenty million dollars." Gary didn't care. What Gary was interested in
was inventing.
On Cooper's first day at DRI, he recalls, Gary took him to Esther
Dyson's high-level industry conference. "He gave me John Rowley's
badge, and we climbed into his Aerostar and flew [to Palm Springs].
I remember running into Bill Gates and saying I had just joined Gary
Kildall in research. I said I was working in research and development.
He chuckled that Gary had set up an R&D department. He considered R&D
to be part of what everybody did. Bill was right."
Gary, however, wanted to segregate R&D from the mundane concerns of
the business. He wanted a skunkworks, a small crew that pursued
projects on the basis of interest, just as pure academic researchers
follow the interesting idea rather than worry about someone's bottom
line. And he did.
Some good ideas came out of the skunkworks, although the best mostly
came from Gary. He did groundbreaking work on CD-ROM software and on
interfacing computers and video disks. A company, KnowledgeSet, came
out of that work. So did a CD-ROM-based Grolier's Encyclopedia, a
product that showed everyone how to do CD-ROM content. Microsoft's
later enviable position in the CD-ROM content market owes a lot to
Gary Kildall's good ideas and Bill Gates' ability to spot a good idea
and pounce on it.
In the midst of the rest of the confusion, Gary and Dorothy split up.
It was more than a private, personal matter, since both of them stayed
at DRI. So did the other woman. The atmosphere grew more tense than
it already was.
<FAME>
As Digital Research floundered and flailed, Microsoft flourished.
Sometimes Microsoft flourished in ground cleared by Gary Kildall, as
in the case of MS-DOS, as in the case of multimedia/CD-ROM technology.
The legend of Bill Gates as the technological genius who invented
everything in the personal computer realm grew, while a dwindling
percentage of computer users had even heard of Gary Kildall.
Kildall was always gracious about this.
At least publicly he was gracious. Inwardly, he hid a bitterness that
few ever saw. One day, though, Cooper got a glimpse of Gary's depth of
feeling about proper credit for invention.
"Kildall took me aside once, about '83. [He started] talking about
Apple.
He opened this door, and I saw the bitterness: 'Steve Jobs is nothing.
Steve Wozniak did it all, the hardware and the software. All Jobs did
was hang around and take the credit.'" Cooper was not blind to the
implications of this. Kildall resented that Gates, this dropout, this
businessman, was getting credit for things that Kildall had invented.
"All of a sudden there was this cauldron of resentment. It must have
tortured Gary that Bill Gates [got all the credit]."
Whether Kildall's resentment of Bill Gates was fair or not-and it is
important to repeat that it was never publicly expressed-it was
probably inevitable. When you look at the allocation of credit in the
computer industry from a collegial, academic perspective, it does seem
that Bill Gates and Microsoft have, now and then, got credit that
rightfully belonged to others. It's hard to defend the idea that this
is the right perspective to use in looking at an industry, but a
collegial, academic perspective was exactly the perspective from which
Gary Kildall viewed his world. He could hardly help but feel wronged.
<AUSTIN>
Gary never went back into academia, staying with DRI to its end, when
it was sold to Novell in 1991. At Novell, all traces of DRI products
and projects quickly dissolved and were absorbed like sutures on a
healing wound.
Gary then moved to the West Lake Hills suburb of Austin, Texas. The
Novell deal had made him a wealthy man. His Austin house was a sort of
lakeside car ranch, with stables for 14 sports cars and a video
studio in the basement. He owned and flew his own Lear jet and had at
least one boat. In California, he kept a second house: a mansion with
a spectacular ocean view on 17 Mile Drive in Pebble Beach. He started
a company in Austin to produce what he called a "home PBX system,"
called "Prometheus Light and Sound." He did charitable work in the
area of pediatric AIDS. It should have been a good life, but all was
not sublime. His second marriage was ending in divorce, and there were
signs that lack of credit was continuing to eat at him.
Then, while in Monterey in 1994, Gary Kildall died from internal
bleeding on July 11, three days after falling down in the Franklin
Street Bar and Grill in downtown Monterey. He was 52.
<LEGACY>
And there the history of Gary Kildall and Digital Research ends. But
it is more than mere politeness to say that a legacy remains. In
March, 1995, the Software Publishers Association posthumously honored
Gary for his contributions to the computer industry. They listed some
of his accomplishments:
He introduced operating systems with preemptive multitasking and
windowing capabilities and menu-driven user interfaces.
Through DRI, he created the first diskette track buffering
schemes, read-ahead algorithms, file directory caches, and RAM
disk emulators.
In the 1980s, through DRI, he introduced a binary recompiler.
Kildall defined the first programming language and wrote the first
compiler specifically for microprocessors.
He created the first microprocessor disk operating system, which
eventually sold a quarter million copies.
He created the first computer interface for video disks to allow
automatic nonlinear playback, presaging today's interactive
multimedia.
He developed the file system and data structures for the first
consumer CD-ROM.
He created the first successful open-system architecture by
segregating system-specific hardware interfaces in a set of BIOS
routines, making the whole third-party software industry possible.
That's a good list, as far as it goes. But friends and students might
make a different list, citing his gift for explaining, his patience,
his high standards in his work, his generosity. Those who knew him in
later years in Austin might cite his pediatric AIDS work.
These things are worth remembering, and represent a real positive
impact on the world, whether remembered or not.
As for Kildall's place in computer history, it certainly shouldn't be
as The Man Who Wasn't Bill Gates. "It was" as his friend and colleague
Alan Cooper puts it, "Gary's bad luck that put him up next to the most
successful businessman of a generation. Anyone is a failure standing
next to Bill Gates."
He was by any measure an admirable man, a business success, an
inventor of importance, a humanitarian.
And, above all, a teacher. "When *Fortune* magazine writes about Gary
Kildall," Cooper said, "they don't see him in his natural habitat: a
university." Kildall was never happier than when he was in that
academic habitat, solving tough problems and sharing the solutions
that he discovered openly with others.
He should have stayed in academia, a relative later said. It's what he
loved. But in a sense, he never really left.
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*Copyright (c) 1997, Dr. Dobb's Journal*
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