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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 Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th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."
After reading the title, I thought this was going to be about Steve Jobs!
Monstar L
This has actually been discussed at length in other books, most notably Michael Swaine's excellent Fire In The Valley.
Bill Gates was a negociator, not a programmer, that's why the other could in no way have become him.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Would we have hated him as well?
So what? Life is not fair and never has been. I'm sure history is rife with examples of people 'not getting their due'.
Waaaa...waaaa...waaaaaahhhh. Cry me a river!
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,
Gates deserved his accolades for being a shrewd businessman, not for his programming skills. Kildall doesn't deserve them for precisely that reason, because he isn't a good businessman, couldn't promote himself or his products, etc.
It's no good being a great programmer or having a great product generally if you can't communicate that or convince anyone of it.
from TFA: For all his technical brilliance, he was a poor businessman. I think that's the real point. It certainly wasn't technical superiority that got Microsoft where it is today. It was marketing superiority.
You mean this guy could have been responsible for the least secure OS on the planet? That's a legacy best left to others I think.
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 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.
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Nothing to see here
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
"Kildall seemed to represent the best hopes of the nascent computer industry. But by the time he died at age 52, after falling in a tavern"
"Kildall's then-wife, Dorothy McEwen, the company's business manager, refused to sign their nondisclosure agreement. She is now ill with brain cancer and can't remember the events, according to daughter Kristin Kildall."
Do we see a trend here?
Mark
All too often I've seen people (in this industry) assume false rights (like intellectual "property") and then when someone else does an end run arround them then they get mad because they were sidelined.
Well, I'm sorry to see them hurt, but what did they expect?
"persistence". Okay. That very CP/M that IBM and Microsoft stole from him was the basis for DR-DOS (via CP/M-86), which Microsoft proceeded to sandbag via various anticompetitive means, ultimately resulting in a very hefty payoff for Caldera, plus significant contribution to the antitrust case against Microsoft.
He was persistent. He did work hard. He had a slime ball working against him for whom laws are optional.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
This assumes that Bill Gates is rich because he's a programming genius. That's not at all true. He's rich because he is a ruthless businessman, a shrewd negotiator, and takes no prisoners.
As Peter van der Linden wrote, "Don't worry about Gary; he'd rather be flying," or something to that effect.
There are more important things than being the richest man in the world.
He was a verray parfit gentil knight.
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!
MS got the deal with IBM. But MP/M the multiuser version of CP/M was reversed engineered and became the "secret" filesystem of early Novell. That was why Novell brought DR to avoid a lawsuit, it wasn't just to get DR-DOS. So Kildall lost out there too.
Even if you're product is technically best by some measure there are other products that may be technically better by some other measure. Hindsight often tells you which benchmark was right and which was wrong but in the heat of battle it's hard to see the forest for the trees.
And all that said, oftentimes the selected product is simply vaporware (as was MS-DOS until Gates bought QDOS) when there are real running products out there. Part of it is salesmanship on one side and lack of salesmanship on the other side, but usually there's some favors being traded under the table.
And while Kildall wasn't the biggest fish in that pond, he had hooks into a number of software packages (CP/M was being sold on millions of PC's, the DR languages and tools too).
I've heard the story about how IBM was left standed, but I've also heard that's just an urban legend and they did come to some agreement, went into some talks, and didn't come to an agreement on other matters. The NDA was just something that caught on to the storytellers, but wasn't totally true.
So I recall hearing somewhere...
Many Slashdotters probably know that the reason IBM worked with Gates and no one else is because Gates's family was rich and well connected. Gates's mother was probably the one that got him in good with IBM. Gates's mother served on the board of the United Way with IBM's Chairman John Opel. What a coincidence!
This is just another example of how the elites at the top of the hieracrchy operate as some sort of parasitic sub-society, perched above us, exploiting the rest of us, feeding off of us.
You may think that my perspective is warped, paranoid, whatever. But I think it serves as a reality check and a balance to the omnipresent messages of confomuity that society and the media flood us with every day.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
my 8" floppy disk died and I had an error message "BDOS ERR ON A: BAD SECTOR". Then I mistyped the PIP command and I had the error message "BDOS ERR ON A: BAD SECTOR"...
Sounds like Gates and IBM Kildall his hopes and dreams ...
Kildall was too engrossed with making immediate profit to, even if he had got in the door first, have prospered for long.
Kildall is requesting $699 per cpu of the operating system he invented. :)
It has brief bios of many of my heroes [Edison was a nerd, right?] with interesting insights into how they wrestled their ideas into realities, who they fought, what they did differently from contemporaries.
In my 30 years of programming, many of them at startups, I know of nothing to compare to the myriad drained lives, burnt hopes and stolen thunder that bob and sink in the wake of Mr. Gates. Larry Ellison may be a runner up to Gates in this grim category but that is usually how those two fare in their competition. For every millionaire Gates made, there was a company out there that had a good idea and smart people who still couldn't grow in the shade of Microsoft. To name names would rub salt in the wounds of some good friends...lets just say having a great idea and a willingness to work hard are not enough to insure success. The lucky ones were assimilated.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
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 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.
1) Release an O/S ripped off from a competitor, with no copy protection at a low price.
2) Everyone adopts your O/S because it is cheap to buy, or can be copied for free easily.
3) See off all competition, make the API so huge & unweildly that no one can clone it. Patent bits of it to make sure.
4) Stamp down on copying, introduce draconian licensing scheme that ties every copy you sell to one PC, undermining normal rights of purchasers to resell or move O/S to other PCs.
5) Jack up prices.
6)...
7) PROFIT!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
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); }
It's true and it's also true that IBM did business with him because the CEO of IBM at the time knew Bill Gates' mom. "...you're Mary's son? Ok sure here's the goose that lays golden eggs..." So it helps to know people, definitely helps and it is what makes the world go 'round.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
I wish my last name was Gates so I could say "Hi, I'm Bill Gates." Oh, and I wish my first name was Bill.
--Jack
Everyone on /. seems to assume that coding is the alpha and the omega and nothing else matters. That if you code some clever algorithm, screw the interface, screw users and screw marketting. Only the high magic hacking matters, right.
You see that attitude reflected in 100,000 piss-poor open source projects that noone wants to use. They've got all these cool optimizations and clever hacks, and should have been the next greatest thing. Except they aren't, because noone gives a damn about them.
What makes a program or a company successful is what you do _after_ you have the cool algorithm or hack. Like user interface. Or like usability.
The same goes for CP/M. It was barely a program loader with the most minimalistic command-line interface. Even internally it was a primitive monolythic piece of code that basically it didn't even have DOS's (or Unix's) separation between directory entry and allocation table. It would have required a complete redesign just to support bigger floppies.
DOS or CP/M were but a starting point, _not_ a killer app that turned MS into a monopoly over night. Sure, the cash infusion from DOS helped a lot to get them started. But if MS had stayed happily making just DOS, they'd still be a small company noone gives a damn. In fact, less than that, since other OSs were more advanced and Moore's Law would soon make a PC good enough to use those instead of DOS.
The story of MS is far more complex than that of DOS alone. And their monopoly isn't just the OS, it's a whole lot of interlocking pieces which make the OS a must.
It includes for starters making some damn good and _affordable_ apps for it too. When you ask someone why don't they switch to Linux, what's the ISO standard answer you'll get? "Does it run Word, Excel and IE?" They jumped on any app idea that looked like their users might need badly.
It also includes caring about the developpers. Yes, laugh all you want at Uncle Fester's "developpers developpers developpers" monkey dance. But _that_ is what kept Windows having a steady stream of apps, while for other OSs you'd have a hard time just getting any dev tools at all.
Basically while all the idiots thought "noooo, you can't take my precioussss compiler! I want to be the only one who sells apps for my OS!" and left you begging for months even for a compiler, MS almost gave away everything you could possibly want to make an app.
It also includes being smart enough to realize the importance of users and of a good UI. You know why the relationship between IBM and Microsoft went sour? Because the idiots at IBM thought a GUI was a waste of money. That MS should concentrate on just making an API for geeks, and stop wasting money on stuff like a GUI.
Etc, etc, etc.
Saying that just replacing DOS with CP/M would have made another company become Microsoft, is short sighted and idiotic.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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)
There is also evidence to suggest that Microsoft were following similar practices many years before the DoJ case. See also "The Microsoft File: The Secret Case against Bill Gates"
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.
"Evans bases his Kildall chapter on a 226-page, never-published memoir written by Kildall just before his death in 1994. ... But by the time he died at age 52, after falling in a tavern, he had become embittered and struggled with alcohol."
So, the entire chapter is based on the writings of an embittered drunk after he had become an embittered drunk.
"Screw you all, I would have been Shaq if it hadn't have been for that deliberate foul that caused my knee injury!" doesn't make the washed up drunk any more of a pro basketball player. It doesn't even mean the foul was deliberate. It means an embittered person who didn't have any of the rest of the personality aspects that led to the other person's success, never put in the work, never fought as hard to get back up from setbacks, and, likely, wasn't even fouled half as deliberately as they've come to convince themselves has simply convinced themselves that their life could have been better if it wasn't for something unfair someone else did to them.
Basing an article on their embittered rantings, because it makes for a sensational enough article to sell some copies of your book and get some headlines, isn't exactly what I'd call great journalism.
If I was born 30 years earlier, far uglier, and a manipulative geek.
Two out of three ain't so bad...
No sig
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
> Bill Gates' rise to fame and power is because of his skill as a businessman...
Wrong.
Bill Gates rose to power because he is a criminal, and nothing was done when he broke the law.
Gates had the good fortune to be working in an industry that involved a totally new technology, i.e. software. This meant that the government had no idea what to do about Microsoft's various acts of sabotage, fraud, etc. In a smarter world, the courts would have realized that you don't need new laws, rather, the same laws apply to software as apply to other property, and in other industries.
Bill Gates won because the leaders of the other companies in the software industry were basically-honest, good businessmen, whereas Gates was a criminal.
When the law is not enforced, a criminal will beat a businessman every time.
Let's look at some of Microsoft's history.
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).
That's fraud -- a criminal act. The courts ignored it.
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.
That's sabotage -- a criminal act. The courts ignored it.
WordPerfect had already beaten Microsoft in the Word Processing market. But Microsoft side-tracked Wordperfect when they promised the world that OS/2 was the new direction, then undermined WordPerfect on Windows by providing intentionally-broken API calls.
That's fraud and sabotage, ignored by the courts.
Netscape had already beaten Microsoft in the browser market, until Microsoft started doing things like paying companies to break their contracts with Netscape.
There were various criminal acts there, which were generally ignored by the courts (other than a partial invocation of the nearly-useless anti-trust laws).
And in Java, Sun provided a cross-platform language that was perfect for web-based applications, such as e-commerce. Microsoft had nothing similar to offer, and it has taken Microsoft ten years to catch up.
Once again, Microsoft stopped Java with sabotage and fraud. And this time, Microsoft's criminal acts were perfectly documented in Microsoft's own internal papers:
Sabotage:
"Strategic Objective . . . Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market."
Fraud:
"At this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps."
Some people point to Microsoft as an example of Capitalism at work, but it's not true. When criminals are allowed to get away with their crimes, it actually undermines Capitalism.
To repeat my initial point. Bill Gates is NOT a "skilled businessman" -- he is a criminal, whose various acts of sabotage, fraud, and so on, should have landed him in jail.
Offtopic yes, but this is one of the best photos I took of Tim rallying here in Washington State. From June of 2004:
Tim Paterson
GET'em, TIGER.
If only there could be a retroactive suit to go back and put a cap in ms' corrupt corporate ass.
This kind of information, if made required reading, could put one HELL of a dent in ms' filthy image.
Would it be safe, legally, to put this knowledge into a GNU/GPL file and deliver it onto websites or onto Linux disks and other media? I know it's not good to deliver scathing commentary or facts about a ruthless, cutthroat, vile, filthy, uncouth, deserving-to-be-strangled-asshole-company, but sometimes...
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Subterfuge
a grams
Trickery-dickery
It's too bad Apples own lawyers MISSED that. It's a height of folly for a lawyer to miss injected specfics that are an attempt to "minefield" a contract into oblivion.
Gotta be careful with those "version #" and "any version" clauses.
It's this kind of tricky-dick stuff that mires musicians and novelists, especially the publishing houses that CLAIM to be PROTECTING themselves when they demand the author submits to the publisher's ownership/control:
--all drafts,
--sketches
--blueprints
--models
--di
--plans
--audio/visual recordings
--notes
and other nouns. They are not just doing due diligene to ward off complaints or suits, you know. They are trying to hem up the author who two years into a 3-year contract starts negotiations with another publishers. If said author surrenders ALL that material, other than the manuscript itself, said author most likely is SCREWED, and even unable to present that non-selling, non-performing material to a new suitor.
Capitalism and business law at its best.
That is why, as an aspiring author and as an artist NONE of my drawings or works leave my ownership. Anybody wanting to play the game with ME is only getting a non-exclusive license for a limited period of time in which to ATTEMPT to make a buck. By no means do they acquire and blocking or obstructing rights to hem me in. If I can create drawings, then they can go make their own if they want control over drawings.
Authors, whether of software, books, drawings, or what-nots MUST become non-conformists and use everthing at their dispose, from copyright, to copyleft, to creative commons, to GPL/LGPL/ and more. SOME RIGHTS reserved is better that ALL RIGHTS surrendered.
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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.
They are totally different people with a different set of morals and attitudes..
I dont believe Gary could be the same sort of ruthless business man that Bill has been.
Having the product is only 1/3 of a business, the rest is how you manage 'the business'....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"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."
Geoworks was well ahead of Windows, but Geoworks and DR-DOS were pre-installed on a large number of PCs? Maybe at a couple of swap meets, but not in the real world. . .The only somewhat mainstream implementation of Geoworks that momentarily bobbed into the mainstream was as an early GUI for America Online. Other than that it was forgotten as quickly as it was introduced.
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
I think you are missing the point. I never said that the Elite Parasitic Sub-society (EPSS) is inevitable. I said that it is. Full Stop.
But there are also sub-elite parasitic sub-societies, faith-based parasitic sub-societies, scum-of-the-earth parasitic sub-societies, and internet parasitic sub-societies.
Society works this way. Nobody will invite you to join their band if they don't know that you play the bassoon. How will they find out? Either they'll see you playing on a street corner, see your flyer at the record store ("non-elite non-parasitic bassoon player seeks hammered dulcimer and timable players for new-age ska fusion band", or your mom might mention it in passing, to her hairdresser, who's daughter is the top hammered dulimaniac in town, and since your mom is a good tipper, the hairdresser gives your number to her daughter. All of these scenarios involve some person interacting with some other person. Scenario 1 is you interacting directly with somebody else, face-to-face. Scenario 2 is a time shifted version of scenario 1, and scenario three has somebody with whom you've directly interacted, interacting with somebody else, face to-face.
The human interaction is unavoidable (and inevitable) Its how society works, at all levels.
You really do need to come to grips with this, otherwise, you might end up writing a Manifesto about elite parasitic sub-societies. Then it's not a huge leap to membership in The Friends of the Hooded Sweatshirt Society.
Play golf, go bowling, join a church choir, locate a scrapbooking consultant, learn tai chi or kendo.
Your key to getting ahead is gaining the personal trust of people who can help you get ahead when they need the skills you've got. You could meet a girl. her dad might be rich an powerful, and be in need of a son-in-law to take over the firms operations so he and the missus can travel asia like they always wanted to.
Besides, it isn't the elite parasitic sub-socities you need to worry about, its the Elite parasitic sub-societies: The Bavarian Illuminati, the CIA, and Evil Geniuses for a Better fnord Tomorrow.
My Heart Is A Flower
When your post gets +modded it becomes more visible and more people moderate it.
Slack moderators don't concentrate on modding up more than down. Slack moderators also don't browse at -1, but +2, so by the time your posting becomes visible the good moderators start to leave off and the bad ones knock it back down again.
And of course, in a crowd the size of the slashdot crowd there is room for any number of moderator conspiracies to co-exist, no doubt there is more than one of the type you mentioned.
its the same sort of behaviour that swings online polls widely as the two extreme opposing camps canvas their friends and set up vote spoofers whenthey start to loose.
The answer is to meta-moderate.
It doesn't neccessarily mean that the bad moderators lose mod points in future but it does help make sure that the sort of moderators slashdot has are the sort of moderators it's readers appreciate.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
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.