Slashdot Mirror
The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates
theodp writes "BusinessWeek discusses They Made America, a new book which claims Bill Gates got the rewards due Gary Kildall. The book attacks the reputations of key early PC era players - Gates, IBM, and QDOS programmer Tim Paterson - asserting that Paterson copied parts of Kildall's CP/M and that IBM tricked Kildall, allowing Gates to prevail and depriving Kildall of untold riches and credit for a seminal role in the PC revolution. Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th anniversary of its CS program."
This has actually been discussed at length in other books, most notably Michael Swaine's excellent Fire In The Valley.
Bill Gates was a programmer
Sure, he didn't stay up late writing the first versions of Word, Excel, or even Windows, but he was a programmer. Rumor was the last product he actually worked on was a version of BASIC in the 80's.
Why code when you can take over the world. He's way to old to really be a programmer these days, anyhow.
The guy sold his company to Novell for $120 million. Cry me a river...
I was watching an old episode of Triumph of the Nerds yesterday, and they mentioned how Gary Kildall didn't seize the opportunity.
Kildall wrote a seminal paper called "A Unified Approach to Global Program Optimization" which introduced dataflow analysis as a general technique for program analysis and compiler optimization. Every time you add -O([1-6])* to your gcc command line, you're applying techniques that Kildall invented.
:-)
CP/M was pretty cool, too
Im parapraising "Trimuph of the Nerds" here so I'm probably missing something here, but basicially this is what it said.
IBM First went to MS asking for BASIC and if they could buy the OS that was built into Microsoft Softcards for the Apple II for the IBM PC. MS directed them to Digital Research saying that they didn't have the right to sell IBM the OS.
IBM goes to Digital Research, and basicially gets the cold shoulder.
IBM Goes back to MS asking for an alternative to CP\M.
Bill gates finds QDOS, buyes it for $50,000 dollars and sells the rights to it to IBM.
More infomation can be found on wikipedia Here
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Cat's dung sounds more like it. CPM had FCBS instead of handles for file operations. For all practical purposes it was a VMS hangover which was horrible to program for and would have never scaled past what CPM was used for (simple 8 bit apps).
One of the reasons DOS won (besides bundling, IBM and Paul Allen's excellent business sense) was Dos 2.x which introduced file handles (idea nicked from Unix). In fact this is where the PC revolution started because it was easy to use and easy to write 3rd party software.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Rumor was the last product he actually worked on was a version of BASIC in the 80's.
I heard a rumor that DOS 3 was the last project that contained any of his code.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Bill does offer a free (as in beer) development environment for hobbyists: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
Pirates of silicon valley: History of Apple and Microsoft.
Torrent:
http://tinyurl.com/3m3ly
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
I think you're mistaken about that. Yes, he and Allen wrote a basic interpreter which was used. Then they tossed it in favor of GWU Basic, because the MS basic interpreter sucked rocks so bad they couldn't even fix it.
I personallly think the shame with Kildall is that he got so royally screwed by someone like Gates. But he wasn't the only one, the list of Gates's victims is long. Kildall was merely one of the first.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I worked at Digital Research for three summers (1982-84). The story about Kildall going flying was often told, but many people said it wasn't true. I don't think we'll ever know, because basically there aren't any impartial witnesses.
Find free books.
IF you want to see Gary Kildall on TV goto www.archive.org and download some 80's era episodes of "Computer Chronicles" where he was often guest host - lots of other interesting guests too, like Bill Joy, Elizabeth Rather, etc.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You mean stuff like this or this?
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
The Microsoft .NET Framework and SDK are free.
The Microsoft C# compiler is free.
The Microsoft VB.NET compiler is free.
The Microsoft C compiler is free.
The Microsoft C++ compiler is free.
A Microsoft WebForm IDE is free (WebMatrix)
Umm... the Bob concept was invented by his (then) girlfriend. Thank Melinda Gates for Clippy (the Office team borrowed the Assistant idea from Bob), and that damn annoying dog in XP.
According to the book "Big Blue," the unnofficial corporate biography of IBM, the IBM PHBs were at a loss as to what to load on to the upcoming IBM PC... Paul Allen, who knew Bill Gates mother from their work on charity boards, asked "What about Mary Gates boy? I hear he works with these things." The rest is history. Gates first contribution was a port of an (open source?) version of Basic from paper tape to mag disc. And in letting Gates keep the rights to his borrowed and stolen programs, IBM committed one of the most noteworthy corporate blunders in business history.
86-DOS, the sucessor to QDOS, was available from Seattle Computer and also used by used at least one other company, Lomas Data Products, before the IBM PC was announced (see the Lomas Data products ad in the June 1981 issue of BYTE).
The BizWeek article was wrong in saying that MS improved 86-DOS for use with the PC. PC-DOS 1.0 was basically 86-DOS 1.14. The big modifications was to make it look more like CP/M UI.
One of the biggest markets for CP/M was the Apple Z-80 board made by M$ and designed by Seattle Computer. The 86-DOS deal was the second time that SCP got screwed over by MS.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
The argument is kinda silly -- If you'd take the time to read about kildall at all you'd realize how bad he did get screwed. (Not that he didn't do his fair share of screwing himself...)
-- How Kildall got fucked --
1) When the IBM PC was released both CP/M and DOS were avaliable. DOS for $40, and CP/M for $240 (If this was a joke, Gary wasn't laughing.)
-- How Kildall fucked himself --
1) He was late for a meeting w/ IBM because he was out flying.
2) He refused to make CP/M more user friendly. It was an incredible work of engineering, but a bitch to use. i.e., to copy a disk from a: to b: in CP/M
> PIP B: A:
In Dos
> COPY A: B:
So yeah, Kildall got fucked by both IBM and himself. Definantly.
But the drunk argument just doesn't wash... That's absurd.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Paul Allen, who knew Bill Gates mother from their work on charity boards, asked "What about Mary Gates boy? I hear he works with these things."
Right quote (almost), right context, wrong attribution. It was actually the chairman of IBM John Opel who said that when he heard that Don Estridge was working with Microsoft. He and Mary Gates had bumped into each other at the United Way board. The quote is "that wouldn't be Mary Gates's boy Bill would it?" (Big Blues, Paul Carroll, pp 33-34)
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
You're right. Gates himself attributes his early success to one thing, contracts! He understood contracts, what they meant, how to do them, and so on. The Microsoft vs Apple case regarding the "look and feel" of the Macintosh interface imitated in windows is an example of that; Apple signed an agreement with Microsoft that effectively banned it from imitating the Mac, and Gates was apparently careful to specify a certain version of windows in the text of the document, so that when Microsoft followed it up with a later version of windows, and Apple sued, their lawsuit collapsed in court as a result of that previous agreement they had.
I don't remember it that way. The reviewers thought DR DOS was better, but it was nowhere near MSDOS's market share. Sort of like how Firefox is better, but is just a blip on screen compared to IE.
Saturn? Saturn is GM, buddy :)
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Microsoft was losing to DR-DOS at the start of the nineties, until Microsoft added a false message about the incompatability of DR-DOS (Gates knew it was false from Microsoft's own testing).
This message never appeared in versions sold to consumers. Is the rest of your information as accurate?
Also at that time, Geoworks was five years ahead of Microsoft in providing a modern, working GUI for DOS. DR-DOS and Geoworks were being pre-installed on a large percentage of PCs. But Microsoft made a change to DOS specifically to cause Geoworks to fail.
Apparently, because I can't find a single reference to this by Googling.
I met Gary Kildall once, and was lucky enough to get a handshake from him, and a Hello.
It was not that he was a bad businessman. It was that he was never about money. He truly believed in sharing his ideas with the people. He was the true populist. He thought that the purpose of his inventions were to aid in the advancement of humanity. I mean that literally, not as rhetoric; some people are actually altruistic by nature.
It is an indictment of us all, that we equate money and power with success. We claim to rise above that, yet the comments here demonstrate the hypocracy of that thought.
We have never had such a hero on our side. Apparently, we do not deserve one.