Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Gary Kildall, Father of the PC OS, Finally Gets His Due

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-a-moment-too-soon dept.

theodp writes: "GeekWire reports that Gary Kildall, the creator of the landmark personal computer operating system CP/M, will be recognized posthumously by the IEEE for that contribution, in addition to his invention of BIOS, with a rare IEEE Milestone plaque. Kildall, who passed away in 1994 at the age of 52, has been called the man who could have been Bill Gates. But according to Kildall's son, his dad wasn't actually interested in being what Bill Gates became: 'He was a real inventor,' said Scott Kildall. 'He was much more interested in creating new ideas and bringing them to the world, rather than being the one that was bringing them to market and leveraging a huge amount of profits. He was such a kind human being. He was always sharing his ideas, and would sit down with people and show flowcharts of what he was thinking. I think if he were around for the open-source movement, he would be such a huge proponent of it.' Techies of a certain age will also remember Gary's work as a co-host of Computer Chronicles."

99 comments

  1. He couldn't have been Bill Gates... by Kenja · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It wasn't about the creation, but the leveraging.

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    1. Re:He couldn't have been Bill Gates... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This. Gates was ruthless from the get-go, the kid read multiple biographies of Napolean for chrissakes. He read biographies of people like JP Morgan, back when you couldn't even find them without trekking to a major university library.

      If Kildall had struck an exclusive deal with IBM, he would've probably made a few tens of millions USD before retiring or being out-maneuvered by businessmen of Gates' caliber.

    2. Re:He couldn't have been Bill Gates... by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      And a few millions USD is an immense amount of success!

  2. The best recognition.. by ThatsDrDangerToYou · · Score: 5, Insightful
    is this: " He was such a kind human being. He was always sharing his ideas, and would sit down with people and show flowcharts of what he was thinking."

    We could use more like him. To be recognized by IEEE is great, but greater still to leave this legacy to his kids and the community.

    1. Re:The best recognition.. by sg_oneill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, I think its wrong to put him in the Jobs, or Gates category. Jobs and Gates where merely better than average technical people but with phenomenal business skills. Kildall was only a better than average businessman but with phenomenal technical skills.

      In a sense he was more a Wozniak character, well meaning, technically brilliant, and for a while at least betting on the right horse.

      And by all accounts, a genuinely decent person.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    2. Re:The best recognition.. by JabberWokky · · Score: 5, Interesting

      To tie them all together, I used a computer for many years that was designed by Woz, marketed by Jobs, with a expanded processor and memory made by Gates' company to run Kildall's OS (and a few others). An Apple ][+ with the Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard card, running CP/M. And I'm sure I wasn't the only one. A world capable of inventing, manufacturing, and garnering capital and sales to see that innovation become available to people requires all of them.

      I know I'd rather have lunch with the likes of Wozniak and Kildall, however. Add Ritchie and Kernighan, and that would be one heck of a table.

      --
      "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
    3. Re:The best recognition.. by newcastlejon · · Score: 1

      Wait, there are non-evil flowcharts? What an eye-opener.

      --
      If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
    4. Re:The best recognition.. by LDAPMAN · · Score: 1

      Thats same machine is responsible for all the success I've had in my career as a technologist. It was outrageously expensive at the time but parents say it's the best investment they ever made.

    5. Re:The best recognition.. by jeremyp · · Score: 1

      I don't see any evidence that Kildall was a better than average businessman. In fact, the evidence is that he was quite a poor business man.

      --
      All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
    6. Re:The best recognition.. by theodp · · Score: 2, Informative

      From the linked BW article: "Kildall ultimately sold his company to Novell Inc. (NOVL) in 1991 for $120 million." Not BillG money, but not too shabby.

    7. Re:The best recognition.. by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      Uh NO. Fuck Gary and his idiotic 8.3 filename convention -- it set computing back 20 years.

      My old Apple DOS 3.3 filesystem had 30 character filenames WITH spaces in it.
      ProDOS had even 15-character filenames and directories.

      CP/M was total shit.

    8. Re: The best recognition.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      *headdesk*

      Only on /. would somebody read a story a person who not only made an immense contribution to the development of personal computers but was by all accounts a genuinely nice person, and then crudely insult them over the trivial matter of their choice of filename convention.

      That kind of comment only belittles the person who made it.

    9. Re:The best recognition.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The only problem with the moderation system going up to 5 is that it does not get to acknowledge the 1 in a billion posts that deserve a 6 like the post above.

    10. Re:The best recognition.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      moron!

      CP/M was 6.3

      DOS was 8.3

      duh

    11. Re: The best recognition.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Loved seeing his enthusiasm on computer chronicles and yes that would be one heck of a great diner party with the 4 horseman of IT.

    12. Re:The best recognition.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      IBM: "Is your OS any good?" Bill Gates: "Please! We only steal from the best!" (not true, btw)

    13. Re:The best recognition.. by sg_oneill · · Score: 1

      I don't see any evidence that Kildall was a better than average businessman. In fact, the evidence is that he was quite a poor business man.

      He was actually fantastic, and made serious coin doing something people actually originally thought impossible, writing software.

      Unfortunately he just wasn't shrewd enough to face down Bill Gates, possibly the most talented businessman of the last 50 years. But I doubt many else could either. Bill even managed to wipe the floor with Jobs (You'll note when Jobs finally did take Apple into the stratosphere with the ipod+iphone, Gates was more or less on his way out.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    14. Re:The best recognition.. by ThatsDrDangerToYou · · Score: 1

      Wait, there are non-evil flowcharts? What an eye-opener.

      Oh right? What was I thinking? I don't know anything about CP/M, but I do know that flowcharts are the purest evil. Unless there are doughnuts. Did the man know his doughnuts?

  3. I met Gary by Coditor · · Score: 2

    as a guest on Computer Chronicles in 1987. He seemed like a genuine person, not at all affected by not being Bill. Good to see he finally gets better recognition even if it took so long.

    1. Re: I met Gary by Kalriath · · Score: 2

      Your post is a bunch of crap. Forensic computer scientists looked at the MS-DOS source code and compared it to CP/M code back during the Digital Research trial and verified that it was not stolen. And your rant about that second grade university student (second grade? WTF?) is obviously a pile of shit.

      I know it's trendy to hate Microsoft (Old Microsoft, not to be confused with New Microsoft), but you can do it with actual facts instead of made up bullshit.

      --
      For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
    2. Re: I met Gary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Best line from gp:

      These programmers had all one thing in common, they made something Microsoft wanted, and for some reason Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer simply for no reason wanted them dead

      (emphasis mine)

    3. Re: I met Gary by mark-t · · Score: 1

      Straight out of alt.conspiracy.jfk, and other similar newsgroups.

      Thanks for the entertaining read.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    4. Re: I met Gary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      First of all, you are off-topic.

      Secondly, MS is dead. Nobody gives a rat's ass about MS anymore. The big scary, and potentially much more dangerous, companies these days are FB, Google and Apple. So yeah, 90's called and they need their "hate the MS" thing back.

    5. Re: I met Gary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      MS is dead? That would explain why MS is making money hand over fist. Not bad for a zombie.

    6. Re: I met Gary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      OMG that was an amazing list of lies and half truths and bullshit.

      There is one reason MS is where it is today. *WE* put them there. We demanded it because they were the cheaper solution. Before MS put TCPIP in windows 98 you paid for it (in some cases as much as the OS itself). Take for example OS/2 (of which MS contributed large amounts to). If you wanted a TCP/IP stack for it from IBM you paid upwards of 30k per box. The bundling of IE was not a matter of 'oh should they'. It was a matter of everyone saying 'why havent you yet' except people who liked the crash fest of netscape.

      They were the cheap solution. The reason Apple got its lunch ate by MS was because of cost to develop. I worked in 3 shops that did both MS and Mac software. Outfit 1 mac dev would set you back ~20-30k with some yearly costs thrown in for good measure. Outfit a PC dev, maybe 3k-4k if you bought them a really really nice rig. Apple finally got the idea and charged parts of their dev kit 0 and other parts 100 bucks a year. I can buy an Apple dev kit for 10 years to recoupe one cycle of visual studio now. Notice how they crushed the pad market?

      MS was the *cheap* solution that worked 'good enough'. They are now the expensive solution in relation to everyone else which is why their market share is imploding.

    7. Re: I met Gary by jedidiah · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The cheap solution was the rest of the market beyond Apple and IBM. It wasn't the platform with the IBM trademark associated with it. The PC initially exploited it's association with the original IBM product and then Bill Gates and Microsoft ran with it from there once they already had commanding position in the market due to someone else's trademark.

      Microsoft is ultimately the extension of someone else's monopoly.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    8. Re: I met Gary by Kalriath · · Score: 1

      To think, that'a probably the most intelligible part of that verbal diatribe.

      --
      For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
    9. Re: I met Gary by AaronW · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually OS/2 WARP and even 2.1 included TCP/IP. The OS/2 Warp TCP/IP suite was far better than anything Microsoft had. It was basically based on BSD along with many of the tools that were supplied. I remember buying NFS for OS/2 (there were versions from IBM and Hummingbird) as well as X11 for OS/2 (before XFree86 was ported to it). Later versions of OS/2 included even more features from BSD, including sendmail and the firewall support. I remember being able to telnet into my OS/2 box long before such things were supported by Microsoft. When OS/2 Warp shipped, TCP/IP was an add-on for Windows 95.

      TCP/IP was never a 20-30K option at least from version 2.1 and later.

      --
      This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
    10. Re: I met Gary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      > Before MS put TCPIP in windows 98 you paid for it (in some cases as much as the OS itself). Take for example OS/2 (of which MS contributed large amounts to). If you wanted a TCP/IP stack for it from IBM you paid upwards of 30k per box.

      That is complete nonsense. Trumpet Winsock was available for Windows 3.x as inexpensive shareware. Apparently most used it for free but you can rectify that at http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/

      Windows 95 had TCP/IP, initially in the Plus! pack (which was usually installed by OEMs) but also in OSR1. With the initial Win95 the TCP/IP stack could be downloaded for free from Microsoft.

      """The software is available on the Internet via anonymous FTP from ftp.microsoft.com in the file /peropsys/Win_News/Windows95Information/InternetExplorer/msie20.exe or via the Web at http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie.htm. After downloading msie20.exe run it on the Windows 95 system. It is a self-exploding file that automatically installs the new software. One note: the "20" in the filename msie20.exe is a version number. This will change with time. When you download the file it could have a slightly different name. """

      OS/2 Warp (3.0) had TCP/IP included (though not necessarily automatically installed). The 'Bonus Pack' added TCP/IP to OS/2 version 2 and didn't cost "30k".

      > OS/2 (of which MS contributed large amounts to)

      MS did not 'contribute'. IBM _paid_ Microsoft. In fact MS took (stole) IBM's code that switched between protected mode and real mode and put it in Windows to make Windows-286 usable.

    11. Re: I met Gary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Microsoft is ultimately the extension of someone else's monopoly.

      Kind of like the American Empire built on the ruins of the British Empire....

    12. Re: I met Gary by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 1

      The open architecture of the IBM PC was what made it a success. Virtually everything else was more closed. I mean, IBM published the commented ASM source code for the PC BIOS in the Techref Manual that anybody could buy. They used only common off the shelf chips. Once the cloners started duplicating the design (after enough people wrote clone BIOSes) there was no turning back.

      You're right, though, that the cheap alternative was the cheap plastic junk with 8 bit processors, and proprietary ASICs that consumers could buy in department stores.

    13. Re: I met Gary by 50000BTU_barbecue · · Score: 1

      The open architecture of the IBM PC was what made it a success. Virtually everything else was more closed.

      Say what? Every micro of the era came with schematics!

      --
      Mostly random stuff.
    14. Re: I met Gary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not quite. They indeed were based on ASIC's for IO and mainly, video. Actually video ASIC's were what made them different along with the amount of memory available.

    15. Re: I met Gary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a fad. Everything with zombies makes money these days.

    16. Re: I met Gary by tragedy · · Score: 1

      We demanded it because they were the cheaper solution. Before MS put TCPIP in windows 98 you paid for it (in some cases as much as the OS itself).

      Or you used an OS that wasn't missing critical network functionality like Linux.

    17. Re: I met Gary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow.

      Linus must be kept really busy dodging all those assassins. It's any wonder he has time to work on Linux at all.

    18. Re:I met Gary by antdude · · Score: 1

      Which episode and story were you in CC? I loved watching that show. Matt Chat had a interview with Stewart recently that I mentioned in my /. post: http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... ... :)

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
    19. Re: I met Gary by lissnup · · Score: 1

      The cheap solution was the rest of the market beyond Apple and IBM..

      Yes, and everyone seems to have forgotten Compaq etc

    20. Re: I met Gary by gzuckier · · Score: 1
      The US public always ends up with the worse technology, apparently voluntarily

      DOS vs CPM

      Windows vs OS2

      PC vs Apple

      VHS vs Beta

      44 khz CD vs SACD

      NTSC vs PAL

      18 khz subcarrier FM vs discrete stereo

      jpg vs png

      mp3 vs FLAC or ALAC

      --
      Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
  4. Open Source by brit74 · · Score: 2

    "Kildall, who passed away in 1994 ... I think if he were around for the open-source movement, he would be such a huge proponent of it."

    Doesn't the open-source movement go back to the 1970s? Admittedly, I'm not sure how easy it would be to get involved with open-source projects (other than open-sourcing your own private projects) before the age of the internet.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

    1. Re:Open Source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sure it goes, but it exploded with the common internet, and that didn't happen all over the world before that date. Think of "downloading a linux distro" in europe or asia.

    2. Re:Open Source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That should be "gnu-open-source" you insensitive jerk.

    3. Re:Open Source by sjames · · Score: 1

      It was hard enough in the '90 from across town. It took me over a week and that was only because a kindly sysop granted an exception to the ul:dl ratio.

    4. Re:Open Source by jgotts · · Score: 1

      1994 was the year I first installed Linux. By that point, there were a number of complete Linux distributions. I got my start with Slackware 2.0.

      So he was definitely around for the open source movement, so to speak. It was off most peoples' radar screens in 1994. This site got its start in 1997. I think I joined in 1998.

    5. Re:Open Source by lissnup · · Score: 1

      "Kildall, who passed away in 1994 ... I think if he were around for the open-source movement, he would be such a huge proponent of it."

      Doesn't the open-source movement go back to the 1970s?

      In the '80s, I recall myself and others being more focused on initiatives for Open Systems Interoperability and Connectivity.

  5. Award by Obijon70 · · Score: 1

    IMO, CP/M should get him the award, not even considering BIOS...

    1. Re:Award by TheRealHocusLocus · · Score: 2

      IMO, CP/M should get him the award, not even considering BIOS...

      While Tandy TRS-DOS was my first OS, CP/M on Vector Graphic, Kaypro and Televideo systems was the first one I dove into. In the BDOS I could disassemble memory to instructions and actually figure out what was going on. CP/M was the 8-bit bread and butter of the 8080/Z80 age.

      In 1980 at age 16 I wrote a proof of concept product, a TSR (terminate and stay resident') program for CP/M systems called DataCrypt. You'd load it on startup and be prompted for a pass phrase and it would hash the phrase, tuck itself into ~2k above your COMMAND.COM and terminate-resident, intercepting file I/O. When any running program created or opened a file matching one of several (user-settable) wildcard patterns such as $$??????.???, it would perform transparent crypt or de-crypt of each 128-byte sector.

      So with DataCrypt resident you could use WordStar and work with a mix of encrypted and unencrypted documents. If the program used your primary name with a special extension (like *.$$$) for temporary files even those would be encrypted on disk.

      I sent it out to several folks in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for review but got no bites. At the time there were few computer folk as interested in data security as I was. But even then I was aware that TRUE security was a long distance away. The prototype's CRC32/XOR snake oil encryption had only 32 bits of entropy, which is a wink and a chuckle these days. True DES encryption would have been a slow deal.

      --
      <blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
  6. He was around for the open source movement, innit? by CRCulver · · Score: 2

    While the "open source as something different than Free Software" debate may have exploded in the 1990s after his death, the fellow was around for the many years of GNU and BSD activity and publicity. Did he have any published views on that?

  7. When popularity rules by hessian · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Democracy, markets and social groups all recognize one factor: popularity.

    When popularity rules, engineering comes second. What matters is making a product that many people think they need.

    Gates isn't even a huge offender here. He accomplished something great: he made a company to standardize computing.

    Thanks to him, we have standard hardware, file formats, disk drives, etc. enabling a lot of things including Linux.

    --
    Futurist Traditionalism
    1. Re:When popularity rules by plopez · · Score: 0

      I smell a troll

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    2. Re:When popularity rules by zephvark · · Score: 3, Funny

      I smell a troll

      Take a shower.

    3. Re:When popularity rules by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      After reading this comment, I feel slimed by the troll, and now will take a very long hot shower to get the stink off.

    4. Re:When popularity rules by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Democracy, markets and social groups all recognize one factor: popularity.

      When popularity rules, engineering comes second. What matters is making a product that many people think they need.

      Gates isn't even a huge offender here. He accomplished something great: he made a company to standardize computing.
      Thanks to him, we have standard hardware, file formats, disk drives, etc. enabling a lot of things including Linux.

      Not really. We have blobs of firmware and microcode hidden behind NDAs. Completely undocumented if you are not one of the chosen few.

      Sure, things might appear "standard" from a safe distance of buying pre-fabricated parts, where you don't have to actually know
      anything yourself.

      We have more and more software and hardware that is off-limits, for our own good.

      Just like democracies (d)evolve, in that sense.

      If by "standard" you mean "fork out the dough and you can have what everyone else has -- just don't dare to make your own, or we will see you in court" I don't disagree with you. Just like democracy, again.

      If by "standard" you mean "documented, and free to build your own, no worry about patents or lawsuits" I must completely disagree.

      I don't particular think the triumph of BS over truth is to be celebrated.

      I will do you a favor and not call you a troll. You smell far worse -- a marketing person who believes their own lies.

      The world is what you make it. It grows where you water it.

      When popularity rules, engineering comes second. What matters is making a product that many people think they need.

      No, you have to decide what matters, for yourself. Not what you read on some message board. Not what someone else told you matters. Who are you to tell anyone what matters?

  8. About time by stox · · Score: 1

    Gary's contributions in the early days of microcomputing were very significant. Few have contributed nearly as much.

    --
    "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
  9. I prostrate myself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    before Mr. Kildall.

    Thank you sir for all you have done.

  10. Computer Chronicles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now there's a blast from the past. I won't say I watched it religiously, but after that and print media there just weren't a lot of sources for tech news back then.

    1. Re:Computer Chronicles by captjc · · Score: 2

      The entire series was donated to The Internet Archive I find it awesome watching the old episodes to see how far we came. Seeing laptops that boast about a fantastic battery life of 2 hours with an *OMG* color screen or seeing a Panasonic rep saying about how the 3DO will kill Nintendo is a great nostalgia trip.

      --
      Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
  11. Just goes to show by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That one needs to stay OUT OF HICK BARS

    If one must tie one on go to a strip club

    Nothing but pussies there

  12. Re:Sure he contributed a lot... by westlake · · Score: 1

    and a rival company claims he ignored the IBM reps and 'went flying'. Its not true, but Gates claims that it is.

    IBM went to Microsoft and Gates for an operating system and programming languages for their new micro --- and Gates sent them on to Kildall.

    Various reasons have been given for the two companies failing to reach an agreement. DRI, which had only a few products, might have been unwilling to sell its main product to IBM for a one-time payment rather than its usual royalty-based plan. orothy might have believed that the company could not deliver CP/M-86 on IBM's proposed schedule, as the company was busy developing an implementation of the PL/I programming language for Data General. Or, the IBM representatives might have been annoyed that DRI had spent hours on what they considered a routine formality [a non disclosure agreement.

    Kildall obtained a copy of PC DOS, examined it, and concluded that it infringed on CP/M. When he asked Gerry Davis what legal options were available, Davis told him that intellectual property law for software was not clear enough to sue. Instead Kildall only threatened IBM with legal action, and IBM responded with a proposal to offer CP/M-86 as an option for the PC in return for a release of liability. Kildall accepted, believing that IBM's new system (like its previous personal computers) would not be a significant commercial success. When the IBM PC was introduced, IBM sold its operating system as an unbundled option. One of the operating system options was PC DOS, priced at US$40. PC DOS was seen as a practically necessary option; most software titles required it and without it the IBM PC was limited to it's built-in Cassette Basic. CP/M-86 shipped a few months later at $240, but sold poorly against DOS and enjoyed far less software support.

    Gary Kildall

    CP/M-86 was cut-priced down to $60 by 1983. Too late,

  13. I remember him for GEM by DadLeopard · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The GEM Graphic environment manager, would have been the world standard, well expect for the "Look and Feel" Lawsuit that Apple brought against it when it was released for the IBM PC and Clones. After the settlement it was so neutered as to be fairly useless! It was a dream to use in it's full implementation on the Atari 1040ST. Drag and drop and a windowed environment way before Microsoft got around to it!

    1. Re:I remember him for GEM by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 2

      Apple sued all the early GUI interfaces out of business. You might even say they caused Microsoft's success with Windows, by clearing the field for them.

    2. Re:I remember him for GEM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Posting as AC because I modded in this thread....

      GEM was huge when it came out. Microsoft was woefully behind with Windows, and the whole buzz was around GEM as the PC version of the Mac. IF you read any of the computer magazines from the time, you'll see that most analysts were rallying around GEM as the future "OS" of the PC. Even the new 16-bit Atari computers decided to use it. It was compatible with DOS and essentially ran on top of it, but still offered some multitasking as well. Ventura Publisher was the killer app for the machine (I owned a copy), but the lawsuit sapped the life out of the product and Digital Research managed once again to flub a great opportunity for market share.

  14. well, he said it was a weekend hack by samantha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I met him back in the 70s. He said that CP/M was something he hacked up one weekend out of frustration with other things available at the time or rather the dearth of much of anything. He wasn't at all impressed by having done so. He wondered why people thought it was a big deal.

    So sorry to hear that we lost him and so very young.

  15. Nice guys by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If he were an asshole, he would have been rich.

    Correlation between wealth and assholishnes = 0.99

    The 0.01 are for guys like the Woz who rode the coattails of an asshole.

    1. Re:Nice guys by tragedy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Wozniak did not ride Steve Jobs coattails. Do you think jobs would have gotten anywhere without Woz at the beginning? He probably would have ended up as a used car salesman.

    2. Re:Nice guys by Archtech · · Score: 2

      I think you may have misunderstood the parent's assertion. I think he meant that Wozniak owed whatever wealth and business success he achieved to riding Jobs' coattails.

      Ironically, I completely agree with your remark that, without Wozniak, Jobs "probably would have ended up as a used car salesman". (Although even then, he probably would have wound up a billionaire). Unfortunately, due to the way our society is structured, it is NOT the geniuses who are rewarded but the people, like Jobs, who exploit their ideas.

      --
      I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
    3. Re:Nice guys by tragedy · · Score: 2

      Woz probably still would have managed some sort of success without Jobs. As for Jobs, I'm not so sure he would be a billionaire otherwise. Jobs was very good at the position he was in, but he was very fortunate. Personalities like his are much, much more likely to self-destruct than succeed.

    4. Re:Nice guys by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OK, they both rode each other's coat tails. That's illegal in parts of the south, of course.

    5. Re:Nice guys by Archtech · · Score: 1

      Yes, it's kind of a very lucky virtuous circle that leads to great wealth and success. You need Woz (the brains), but without Jobs (the huckster) Woz would, at best, get a decently paid job working for some corporation. Likewise, Jobs on his own couldn't strike it rich without some big breakthrough that comes only from a technical guy like Woz. So they both need each other; but when the alchemy happens and the money rains down, 99.99% of it sticks to the huckster.

      --
      I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
  16. Eternal September by hessian · · Score: 1

    I smell a troll

    Pre-Eternal September:

    "Oh look, an outlier opinion. It's either genius or not worth commenting on."

    Post-Eternal September:

    "Someone who disagrees with me. I need to call him a corporate shill, a troll, a pedophile or a racist and then I've won this debate in my own mind and social group."

    --
    Futurist Traditionalism
    1. Re:Eternal September by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Someone who disagrees with me. I need to call him a corporate shill, a troll, a pedophile or a racist and then I've won this debate in my own mind and social group."

      Yes. Repeatedly. With ever-increasing amounts of vitriol until he admits he's wrong or abandons the argument.

      That's the way we thump our chests around here, boy.

  17. Hell... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In my town the only place with linux was a single for-pay board in downtown. And given that it was a couple megs of data and I only had a 2400 baud modem, I wasn't able to get either when I was coveting them. As a result I didn't really get to use any *nix systems until the late 90s, by which time I was pretty proficient in Windows.

    Given what a POS linux was during the late 90s/early '00s, I still did a lot of jumping back and forth, and now Linux is slowly replacing Windows as the 'Good Enough' POS that everybody is using.

    1. Re:Hell... by sjames · · Score: 2

      If it was only a couple meg, you were missing most of the distro. No wonder you thought it was a POS.

    2. Re:Hell... by tragedy · · Score: 1

      That's what cheapbytes.com was great for, back in the days of dialup. You could order a CD and have it delivered faster than downloading the contents. I just went to see if their site was still there. It doesn't seem to be coming up.

    3. Re:Hell... by sjames · · Score: 1

      It looks like they just went poof. Their domain is still registered but DNS seems to be down.

      The BBB says they are believed to be shut down.

    4. Re:Hell... by tragedy · · Score: 1

      It's a pity for nostalgic reasons, but not really unexpected. They had a great service back when network bandwidth was hard to come by.

    5. Re:Hell... by sjames · · Score: 1

      Yeah, fast internet pretty well eliminated their reason to be. I have a few CDs from them on my shelf. I keep them around as a curiosity.

  18. Man, I totally forgot about Computer Chronicles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Brought back a flood of feelings starting to watch that Computer Chronicles episode. Man, I'm old.

  19. "a certain age," eh? by dre80 · · Score: 1

    Aaannnndd that marks the first time I feel targeted by the phrase "of a certain age." You insensitive clod.

  20. Re:When popularity rules...HA! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    yeah, right....like in "embrace, extend, extinguish"????

  21. My memories of Digital Research by John+Jorsett · · Score: 1

    A Navy laboratory project I was on wanted to buy the source code to MSDOS for a project where we needed to make some custom mods. Digital Research said they were interested, but their lawyers made it living hell. Somehow the Navy lawyers and DR's lawyers finally hammered out an agreement (I remember one of the provisions was that we would never, ever, EVER tell anyone that they had sold the code to us), but it took so many months that we had by then written most of what we needed from scratch, so we decided it was better to just finish that rather than spend whatever ungodly sum they had finally agreed to and still end up having to write the custom code for that.

    1. Re:My memories of Digital Research by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      MS-DOS isn't exactly complex, I've had to modify it many times, never with the source code, and it's so easy to reverse engineer. I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would need the source code for MS-DOS.

  22. Ghost in the Shell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I heard him talk once back in the late 70's.
    I anthropomorphize computers to much, but oh well.
    We fight with our digital systems all day and night long, now in out cars and microwaves and clocks. And they fight back
    The UI's suck and they're all different and full of ads and take our information and give back less and less.
    It feels like there is someone in there, a person, or persons. Fighting us, every, step, of, the, way.
    A giant evil program (corporation), like the MCP in Tron!
    But way down, almost buried in the OS(s). There's someone still fighting for you, something of the original soul of computing systems
    that worked FOR you, WITH you.
    thats Gary.
    as long as I keep thinking this everyday. I don't stomp all my computers, and phones and such into dust.

  23. Could have been Bill Gates? by jcr · · Score: 2

    More like, the first guy in a long line that Bill Gates ripped off.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    1. Re:Could have been Bill Gates? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      @jcr: "More like, the first guy in a long line that Bill Gates ripped off."

      "Microsoft Litigation"

  24. Value beyond description by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I used CP/M to start three businesses that migrated later to DOS then Mac. The sheer number of entities that used a Xerox 820 computer with CP/M or an Altos system with M/PM is an indication of the value created early. Early matters. I was on the "internet" in 1992. Some time later the "web" became evolved enough to actually use on some level. It was not till well after the 00 tech crash it really dislocated businesses.

    1. Re:Value beyond description by Osgeld · · Score: 1

      you have no idea what the internet is, do you?

  25. Kildall was amazing; Chuck Moore & others too by Paul+Fernhout · · Score: 1

    http://www.businessweek.com/st...
    http://www.groklaw.net/article...
    http://www.basicallytech.com/b...
    http://www.digitalresearch.biz...
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
    "The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

    Yet, consider what came from Chuck Moore of pre-Bayh-Dole true academic traditions of MIT & Stanford and then internal support in manufacturing and then supporting government-funded Astronomical research:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
    http://www.colorforth.com/HOPL...
    "NRAO, 1971 ... NRAO appreciated what I had wrought. They had an arrangement with a consulting firm to identify spin-off technology. The issue of patenting Forth was discussed at length. But since software patents were controversial and might involve the Supreme Court, NRAO declined to pursue the matter. Whereupon, rights reverted to me. I don't think ideas should be patentable. Hindsight agrees that Forth's only chance lay in the public domain. Where it has flourished."

    Forth still can be a great BIOS and command line system.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

    Although IBM deserves credit for popularizing the VM idea with System 360 and then VM.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

    Smalltalk by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others was a another great option.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

    Kildall, Moore, and Kay/Ingalls all got the idea of virtual machines (with their own ways). Lisp-ers may have got a bit of that too.

    We had choices as a society. I saw some of them first hand in the 1970s and 1980s when I started in computing. I bought Forth cartridges for the Commodore VIC and C64. I worked very briefly on a computer with CP/M (although using Forth on it though). The OS choice pushed by the person born with a million dollar trust fund who "dumpster dived" for OS listings won (who did little of the development work himself) -- with an empire built on QDOS which has shaky legal standing as a clone of CP/M which is probably why IBM did not buy it itself. And we were the worse for it as a society IMHO.
    http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
    http://www.complex.com/tech/20...

    But that problematical path would not have been possible without political and legal decisions to base the development of computing around the idea of "artificial scarcity" via copyright

    --
    A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
  26. Matt Chat's Interviews With Stewart Cheifet! by antdude · · Score: 1

    3/Three Long Parts:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

    They talked about Gary briefly. I don't re(member/call) which one(s) had that discussion. Just watch/listen to all of them if you were a fan of Computer Chronicles like me. ;)

    --
    Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
  27. You smell correctly .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    @plopez: "I smell a troll"

    You smell correctly ..

  28. Your trolling level: *.* out of ***** by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh, so CP/M had 8.3 only?
    Tell me more about how systems developed several years earlier than DOS 3.3, 3.2 and 3.1 had more space available for longer filenames.

    1. Re: Your trolling level: *.* out of ***** by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As I recall, RSTS/E was 6+3 too, and that pre-dated Apple itself by several years.

    2. Re:Your trolling level: *.* out of ***** by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tell me more about how systems developed several years earlier than DOS 3.3, 3.2 and 3.1 had more space available for longer filenames.

      Well, there was Unix, but that was designed to run on PDP11's with a whopping 256kb of RAM.

    3. Re:Your trolling level: *.* out of ***** by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Well, there was Unix, but that was designed to run on PDP11's with a whopping 256kb of RAM.

      IIRC, the early Unix filenames were limited to 14 characters, and if you're using extensions, the dot takes up a character... so not really much better than 8.3.

  29. Photographs of Kildall plaque dedication by Lazowska · · Score: 1

    Some photographs of Friday's dedication of the Kildall plaque in Pacific Grove CA are here: http://news.cs.washington.edu/...

  30. My First Computer Was A CP/M Machine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    When IBM came out with their personal computer, I thought it would go nowhere, because CP/M was so much better. I still use programs that I wrote on my first computer.

  31. Gary was always very helpful by wiz0690 · · Score: 1

    I remember having a problem getting an 8" floppy drive in work properly with CP/M and called Digital Research for support. Gary answered the phone himself and we proceeded to work out the solution in under a half hour. It was a rather trivial timing error. During the conversation I found out he was in his kitchen cooking lunch. Gary would go out of his way to make sure his customers were happy.

    --
    /steve