Gary Kildall Special [PART 1 OF 3]

A profile on computer pioneer Gary Kildall and the important contributions he made to the PC industry including the true story on how IBM ended up using MS-DOS rather than CP/M. Kildall developed CP/M, the first personal computer operating system. He was also a co-host on the early Computer Chronicles series. Includes comments by Gordon Eubanks, Symantec; Tom Rolander, DRI; Tim Bajarin, Creative Strategies; Lee Lorenzen, DRI; Jacqui Morby, TA Associates; Alan Cooper, CP/M applications developer. Originally broadcast in 1995.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• computer
• electronics

[datawinds]

i used cp/m for a few years. he also made the BIOS systems for the 8080 offed to sell it IBM. IBM did not want it... latter on here did make some kind of deal with IBM for PCDOS... but it did not take off like MSDOS.

[diamondphoenix]

Boy is it nice to see credit given for the Originator of the PC Operating System!

[MrKolva]

Much respect to Gary Kildall, i used his Operating system, several years, 25 years ago,.. And now i am using it again!

[gulis4u]

@2daygone2morrow If Gary wasn't flying, then my boss wasn't flying either. They flew together. My former boss is still flying. I guess Gary somehow does too

[2daygone2morrow]

@gulis4u, the story about Gary flying is, according to quite a few people, a myth. Watch part 2, go to 6:40 in. IBM did actually sell CP/M - it had no choice because DOS violated Kildall's copyright! - but they cheated Gary.

[gulis4u]

Strange how years go by. I used CP/M on an Altos 8000 computer with a Z80 (Zilog) 8bit CPU and 64 kb ram. 2 x 8" floppy.. Serial port RS232.

We had WordStar, SuperCalc and dBase. We were able to do a lot of work on those machines.

My boss told me that Gary Kildall perhaps lost the big deal due to his interest in flying small private planes. A very special man with a sad ending.

[gulis4u]

Strange how years go by. I used cp/m on an Altos 8000 computer. 8" floppy.

My boss told me that Gary Kildall partly lost the big deal due to his interest in flying.

[Membrane556]

MS-DOS started out as QDOS later known as 86-DOS by Seattle Computer Products.

Microsoft bought the rights to the OS and farther developed it under direction from IBM into PC-DOS / MS-DOS.

[VintageJunior]

Z, z, z. MS-DOS is a copy of a copy of CP/M. Big difference! ;)

[hendrikjanvanduin]

I remember I used CPM on the Commodore-128.

Time flies when you are having fun?

[Membrane556]

I have a working CP/M machine in my collection and MSDOS is an obvious copy of CP/M.

A few things are different such as pip vs copy.

[HondaH100A]

Kildall wrote the CP/M in 1973 using his PL/M. It initially ran on the 8008, then was ported to the 8080. It looks similar to DOS. IBM, at first turned to Kildall for an OS , but he was unavailable, so they turned to Microsoft. Tim Patterson of SCP began writing an OS for the Intel based 8086 because he was dissatisfied how long it was taking for x86 version of CP/M to be written and called it QDOS. He showed it to IBM and then Paul Allen of MS bought it and then sold it to IBM.