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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 Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th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."
I still have my boxed copies of CP/M-86, DR-C and DR-Fortran at home. Having used CP/M on an Apple ][+ with a Z80 card it was a pretty easy transition. To this day I still use Joe as my editor. It's a virtual clone of WordStar that I used on the CP/M machine 20 years ago.
Too bad DOS and MS won out, CP/M was the cat's meow at the time.
Trolling is a art,
I'm sure we've all had experiences of people telling us how clever Bill Gates is inventing Windows, or the Internet or whatever.
The real shame is that certain computer museums in the USA perpetuate the myth that the manufacturers of software like Bill Gates were actually the inventors of it. I also think that Steve Jobs is a cool guy but doesn't deserve much space in the history of computing. Commercialising and inventing are completely different things.
I can't say I'm surprised to hear that Bill Gates wasn't the innovative programmer he's made out to be, but then we already knew that. His strengths have always been elsewhere, mainly in the form of making some pretty good business decisions. Because of that, this Kildall really couldn't have been Bill Gates - he obviously lacks the business sense.
I do find the assertion that it was all a conspiracy with IBM laughable, though. First, why would IBM care? Second, if IBM had a clue about the future value of DOS back then, they would have bought it outright rather than choosing to license it.
The cool thing about that book is that the first edition was written in 1984, and so offers a timely perspective on the formation of the computer industry. It's not a "looking back" history where facts get muddled over time. Everything is fresh. The second, 1999, edition updates with the history that happened since, and everything remains timely. I read the first edition in college, and bought the second when it came out.
The book was made into a movie a few years ago, which I believe aired on TNT (if memory serves). I see it is now also available on video.
Actually Bill Gates was not a Negotiator. I don't know where you got that from. The people at IBM would not even have agreed to work with him because he was so arrogant if it wasn't for how convincing Paul Allen was.
Paul Allen was pretty much the brains and the charm behind getting Dos into the PC. Bill was just his friend.
IMHO: He got lucky.
"Take that Lisa's beliefs!" - Homer Simpson
I worked at IBM research. Basically if you develop something on IBMs time with IBMs resources they own it. A lot of companies are like that.
Some people like it because if IBM likes the idea they'll throw IBM resourses at it and let you develop it and pay you to do it.
They give you a lot of resourses to get your idea off the ground and will reward you if its a successful product. If its credit your looking for do it yourself.
They even tell the interns, if you have an idea and you want to develop it DON"t tell it to us.