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 Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th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."
Personally, I think we should reward the people who helped the world the most as opposed
That's fine. You can send your money to the various engineers working at large firms who designed and built water purification systems.
Meanwhile everyone else will keep playing on their Xbox and sending their money to Microsoft.
Supposedly he wrote a pretty passable basic interpreter back in the day. Of course, he used free computer time to cross-compile (cross-assemble?) it, then turned around and whined like a bitch when people refused to buy the $1500 license. How many years later, and the man still refuses to release a free development enviroment to hobbyists?
Linux is great, don't get me wrong. I still learn new things that prove this... but me, and at least a few of my friends, the thing that hooked us, gcc didn't cost $200. Had he provided a free Visual Basic Hobbyist Edition, or better yet even c/c++... I doubt I would have ever felt a need.
Shame Kildall didn't live long enough to see linux squash Microsoft.