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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 Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th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.
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.
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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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
"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.
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).
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"...
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.
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); }
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 latest free-ish Visual Studio Express stuff stops working in March or so. I'm not sure if apps compiled with them will stop as well. (Possibly it's built into the .NET 2 beta code.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
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
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)
Free as in Beer. Find a bug in VB.NET compiler? Good luck fixing it....
PS: Ever wonder about the Intellectual Property of Beer producers? Their secret recipes and whatnot? Would they be offended by "Free as in beer"? Funny though, that.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
> 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.
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.