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Gary Kildall will always be one of the misunderstood people related to the PC
industry. At one time this true PC pioneer was a bigger name than Microsoft's
Bill Gates. Other people knew him in later years as the co-host of Public
Television's Computer Chronicles. Unfortunately, some people will claim he was
the man who missed one of the biggest opportunities in business history, but
there are several sides to this story. But to all of us who use PC's, we daily
use commands he had written into the first PC operating system standard. Every
time you use the directory command - DIR - to list files, you're using a cp/m
command that is one of many carry-overs in today's Dos operating system.
Gary Kildall was born in Seattle and later received a computer science degree
in 1972 from the University of Washington. While attending UW, he rubbed elbows
with the young Bill Gates and Paul Allen when they were working at part-time
jobs at computer companies in Seattle's University district. Gary had the same
appreciation for DEC computers that the boys had. After graduation, he joined
the Navy and was stationed in Northern California at Monterey, teaching
computer science at a Naval postgraduate school. When Intel introduced their
first microprocessors, Gary bought one just to play around with. After his
Naval tour ended, he stayed in the area, continuing his teaching, and working
on several projects in his company which he named Intergalactic Digital
Research.
He actually wrote his operating system for microcomputers - which he called
CP/M - control program - microcomputer - in 1973 - two years before the Altair
computer kit appeared on the cover of
Popular Electronics later in 1975. As many things have evolved off
tangents in the PC industry - he actually wrote it as part of another project
he was working on. Gary was trying to get his own language to run on an
Intel 8008 microprocessor. He called this language PL/M - Programming
Language for Microcomputers - and he decided that there needed to be a software
interface - or an operating system - that would enable the microprocessor to
communicate with a floppy disk drive input/storage device. Floppy disk drives
at the time cost a fraction of what a teletype machine with a paper tape cost.
Gary figured correctly that floppy disk drives were the superior technology.
Being a fan of DEC minicomputers, he borrowed a lot of the features he admired
in DEC's TOPS 10 operating system for PDP-10 computers and adapted them to his
CP/M system.
A few years later - after Bill Gates and Paul Allen had written their version
of Basic - borrowing many features from DEC's version of Basic - successfully
fed it into the Altair computer using a paper tape - and after the Altair
computer had been cloned by
IMSAI and others and when microcomputers began to take off - Gary
Kildall was in the right place at the right time with an in-place operating
system - CP/M - which would allow these early computers to use floppy disk
drives - and in theory at least - allow programs from one computer to run on
another computer - because they shared the same operating system.
CP/M became the dominant operating system used by the majority of the early
microcomputers, and at one time there were over 100 different micros running
CP/M. Gary Kildall toned down his company name to Digital Research Inc. or DRI
- dropping the seventies sounding "Intergalactic. The PC market place from 1975
until 1981 was dominated and divided between Digital Research and Microsoft,
with an informal understanding between them that Microsoft was THE PC
languages company, and Digital Research was THE PC operating system
company.
Of course there were exceptions to this rule. Radio Shack had their TRS 80's
and other micros with their own Basic and TRSDOS operating system; Atari and
Commodore were in similar situations, and then there was this crazy company
named Apple which was started by a couple
California kids in a garage which had its own operating system. But ironically,
even the Apple II had an add-in
card - developed by Microsoft called the Soft Card - which allowed an
Apple to run CP/M - and over 100,000 were sold.
But we'll talk more about a lot of other ironies associated with
Apple computer next week.