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Gary Kildall, Father of the PC OS, Finally Gets His Due
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."
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?"
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.
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.
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...
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?
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
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!
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.
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.
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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>
If it was only a couple meg, you were missing most of the distro. No wonder you thought it was a POS.
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."
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.
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.
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.