Slashdot Mirror
CP/M Creator Gary Kildall's Memoirs Released As Free Download (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader writes from IEEE Spectrum: The year before his death in 1994, Gary Kildall -- inventor of the early microcomputer operating system CP/M -- wrote a draft of a memoir, "Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the Evolution of the Personal Computer Industry." He distributed copies to family and friends, but died before realizing his plans to release it as a book. This week, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, with the permission of Kildall's children, released the first section and it is available for a free download. The rest of it, which they say did not reflect his true self, will not be made public.
Cool free censorship.
"Unfortunately Gary’s passion for life also manifested in a struggle with alcoholism, and we feel that the unpublished preface and later chapters do not reflect his true self."
> The rest of it, which they say did not reflect his true self, will not be made public.
Kidall was a giant influence on computing. When they say not his true self, they are I presume referring to the melancholy he fell into after the IBM deal crashed and burned. Many of us have to deal with professional failure sooner or later (What young grasshopper? You think you're immortal and Einstein and will be the next Apple? You have some soul breaking lessons ahead of you in life....) Learning about Kidall's journey could help others. Denying it doesn't help anyone, or take away from who Kidall was. It makes him more human. Only the truth can set you free.
Cue 300 posts about fateful IBM CP/M DOS day. Gates "Winners" version is widely accepted but that doesn't mean it's true. Journalists have looked closely into it and found there are so many different stories by those involved, inconsistencies and foggy memories that no one knows what really happened. Think unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Now add an Olympic size swimming pool of ego.
His struggle with alcoholism and the results was part of his true self. Just his children only want to see the positives. Can't blame them but saying it is not part of his true self is not correct.
So this is a redacted memoir then. Slashdot headline seems to be somewhat misleading if they *for some uknown reason* cherry picked out details from the memoir.
As we know, censorship is really hard to do well. A copy has already been sold at auction And they quote some of the good bits: The trigger for writing the book was apparently his pique when the University of Washington asked him, as a distinguished graduate, to attend their computer sciences anniversary in 1992, but gave the keynote speech to dropout Gates. ...
"he said of Gates, He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry..."
Because the first bit rings true and natural for someone technical and bright.
I guess Seymour Cray had the same issues when business and money got in the way of technical elegance. Seymour Cray proved genius cannot be replaced with a team . Yet when things have to scale up - boards do make mistakes.
Examples: DEC - The real Hewlett Packard, and the bright people who coded for the first Apple PC. And Japanese CPU designers, along with AMD.
While certain politicians and Judges think they are remembered for brilliance, programming rock stars are not getting the respect they deserve.
Even Intel once had a phase where 'uncompromised quality' was number one.
Now it is about product cycle and arbitrary delivery deadlines to meet market expectations. Rolling on today, it is a miracle all these spaghetti code OSes work at all, while Adobe is a model of what happens when dedication and passion is missing in the coding area. They need Gary's.
Note all the good stufff came out of universities (OS's) and were commercialized for profit.
Phil Katz, this guy, Andre Hedrick, Reiser, that racist Debian guy ... what's the deal with high performing IT people and self-destructive behavior?
His not getting the IBM PC OS deal was probably a huge blow to him. MS-DOS was in many ways based on CP/M but with some improvements for normal people like using copy instead of pip. It also suffered with many of the warts of CP/M like using the slash for switches. Kildall was from all I heard a great guy but just was not ready for the microcomputer industry to big business. Bill Gates was ready to work the IBM way and eventually beat IBM. Kildall proves the old saying settlers get rich pioneers get massacred.
Look at the history Altar, Commodore, Atari, Tandy/Radio Shack, and Sinclair are all gone from the computer industry. Only Apple survived and that was a miracle. They managed to keep a high priced system alive for a very long time without a lot of business users.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Alcoholism and drug addiction are disease, now they are diseases where the victim is uniquely capable, positioned, and empowered to get well as compared with some like Parkinson but they are still a disease. In the sense they are a disease they make a person less than what they were mentally or physically in some way.
While drugs and alcohol can't excuse actions they way some other diseases like schizophrenia might because of the choice the 'victim' has they do explain them and they do make that person not their best self. I am not aware of Kildall having committed any serious crime or done anything out in society that we should hold against him. Mostly likely the people he hurt most thru his alcoholism were his children. If anyone is owed the 'truth' about their father its them, and if their decision is to have the rest of us rember Gary at his best, that is their choice and I think they have every right to make it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
How are ordinary people supposed to sell our memoirs if people can get the memoirs of some computer legend for free?
His not getting the IBM PC OS deal was probably a huge blow to him.
Hmm, and who's to blame for that? IBM approached him first, after all.
Ezekiel 23:20
If the children only want to see the positives, why publically state he struggled with alcoholism at all?
Perhaps they stopped publication of those parts because they ignored the alcoholism.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Censorship only applies when it's done by the Government.
Civil and criminal penalties for copyright infringement are enforced, well, by the Government.
If the children only want to see the positives, why publically state he struggled with alcoholism at all?
Perhaps they stopped publication of those parts because they ignored the alcoholism.
For the same reason that we point out that you're a retard, but we don't want the things you say to be repeated.
The new norm in the digital age. I would have loved to have read this, having used CP/M, but I don't do EULAs.
But that's not what the netizens demand. So his children are wrong.
The full version will appear on Amazon for $19.99 in a few weeks.
"They say alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only disease you can get yelled at for having. Damnit Otto, you're an Alcoholic! Damnit Otto, you have lupus! One of those doesn't sound right." -- Mitch Hedberg
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
The entire rest of the book is just a rant about how he was screwed by IBM, Microsoft and DOS.
>If anyone is owed the 'truth' about their father its them, and if their decision is to have the rest of us rember Gary at his best, that is their choice and I think they have every right to make it.
Well, you're half right. The children have the right to ask us to remember Gary at his best, and they have the right to deny us information that would keep us from doing so.
However, I and everyone else have the right to just not remember Gary at all. Which is what I'll be doing. I won't read half a memoir.
Perhaps his children prefer that. I don't know.
"Netizens" do not exist. There are only consumers. There is no "cyberspace" or any other childish fantasy: only supply and demand. Grow up.
Free market vs corporatacracy, I'll pick the latter.
...yes, but that doesn't mean what he wrote under the influence of alcohol represented his true self, any more than driving under the influence of alcohol represents your true driving ability.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
While drugs and alcohol can't excuse actions they way some other diseases like schizophrenia might because of the choice the 'victim' has they do explain them and they do make that person not their best self.
(emphasis added)
Particularly when viewed in the context of a lifetime, a person's "best self" is necessarily an amorphous and idealized representation; character models should be considered in whole, and always in the full context of historical environmental and situational factors. Holistic, accurate portrayals may prove inconvenient or painful at times, but attempts to justify revisionist/exclusionary measures predicated upon a requirement that "true" must meet some fanciful notion of "best" will rarely prove wise over the long term. -PCP
MS-DOS was seriously unlike CP/M in almost every way. The only major things that were the API (which was deprecated in 2.x anyway), and, because of the API, the file system had some limitations (drive letters, 8.3 file names) that were similar to CP/M's. Slashes for command line switches didn't come from CP/M, it was fairly common, most DEC operating systems including VMS use slashes for example.
In practice the two were very, very, very different operating systems. Different file systems, different memory management, different command line syntax and approach, different approach to batch files, etc.
Which is not to say Kildall was happy about the API being copied. He wasn't and held that against Microsoft for a very long time.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well I think we need to further differentiate between cases where alcoholism is the disease and where its a symptom of something else. Simple alcoholism is something I believe anyone who wants to get better and over come could do so. I am not saying its easy or there are not real physical problems like withdraw, but there are known solutions to the issues.
If someone got used to drinking with their school buddies everyday and found they just could not stop so easily, I think "Dammit Otto, you're an Alcoholic!" is fair. Otto can stop drinking if we wants to badly enough, if he has a physiological response to doing that like withdraw he can get help and receive known medical treatments that work.
On the other hand alcohol is a common avenue for self medicating a variety of mental and physical illness and chronic pain conditions. That type of complex alcoholism is not so easily addressed especially if there are not reliable cures for the underlying conditions.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
There's an old saying that I've found to be quite true: "A drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts.".
Alcohol takes away inhibitions and the fear of consequences, but it doesn't radically alter the things you're already feeling inside. Some people get angry, some people are happy when when drunk. Some people after enough drinks will break down and cry at the drop of a hat. Still, it's basically their inner self that they normally keep hidden that they just can't keep under wraps.
What he wrote while drunk is likely MORE representative of his true self than the rest.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I liked Gary Kildall. He was a pioneer in the business-oriented microcomputer world. The first computer I owned was a Heathkit H-89 and it ran CP/M. It was an operating system geared more towards business, with a number of compilers, and applications like SuperCalc and VisiCalc available for it. In the late 70's to mid 80's it dominated the business microcomputer market and was very nearly a universal operating system among those kinds of machines.
Given the popularity of CP/M and the growing microcomputer market, it is understandable that Kildall would feel confident in how things were going. However, I wonder if he was not a little myopic. I think that IBM could see right away that their customers would not want to use their PCs as merely stand-alone tools, but as a device that would talk to the mainframe and mini computers. It probably did not matter much to IBM where the PC OS came from, so long as it could do the job. Since they had a veritable monopoly in business class machines, they could plop down whatever they wanted on customers' desks and their customers would buy it as long as it worked.
Was Gary screwed by Microsoft? Yes, to some extent, I think so. However, he had ample opportunity to recognize the potential of working with IBM and to capitalize on it. He made a poor choice. I would like to read his memoirs to get an idea if he was as myopic as I suspect him to have been.
Proverbs 21:19
Parkinson and schizophrenia are diseases, things you can't get intentionally and you can't cure by pure character.
Things are different for alcoholism, and any other drug addiction.
Those are disease only in the same sense that having a bad youth is a disease that causes people to become criminals at a later age.
Treating those as diseases is typical for this politically correct pussy generation (term © Clint Eastwood), but what it leads to is NOT pretty -- just look at that guy in Germany who tried to distract a terrorist (who ended up killing ten people) by yelling insults at him, and got _himself_ arrested for his trouble.
Apple had lots of business users. They were just focused on print and publishing.
Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in Neuromancer, with a protagonist who battled with substance abuse. Nothing childish about that.
the first computer I used was an Osbourne 1 running CP/M. Looking forward to reading the chapter...
His not getting the IBM PC OS deal was probably a huge blow to him.
Hmm, and who's to blame for that? IBM approached him first, after all.
I seem to recall from a book I read once that his wife turned them away at the door when they came knocking. Can't recall which book (it was 20 years ago).
Windows 10 ANNIVERSARY was FREE too. He could be full surveillance right NOW,but NO. Hell.
His wife. The IBM representatives freaked her out, all those people in cheap suits -- she thought they were federal agents trying to gain entrance and would subsequently discover the pot stash, putting her and her husband in prison.
Paranoia, it isn't healthy.
Norway's prison system seems to consider criminal behaviour a disease to be treated. By focusing mainly on rehabilitation rather than punishment, they've achieved one of the lowest rates of recidivism in the world.
As you say, Kildall stole the 'API' from VMS fair and square. How dare anybody else turn around and steal it from him.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You need to know what to read, minus 1 means read the fuck out of that.
"They say alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only disease you can get yelled at for having.
Try catching gonorrhea sometime.
Breakfast served all day!
Alcohol takes away inhibitions and the fear of consequences, but it doesn't radically alter the things you're already feeling inside.
I've known people who get violent when they're drunk. Hell, it's happened to me. Doesn't mean a propensity for violence is part of your "true self." Generally, people who lash out at their friends when they're drunk usually feel ashamed of it the next day.
Alcohol alters your thinking. Some of the ways it alters it might be positive. Others, not so much. True, it doesn't take your entire personality away and turn you into a different person, so of course the things you think when you're drunk will be your own thoughts, and the things you say will be things that only you would think up. But to say that drinking reveals your inner self is a romantic notion -- the kind of thing that wannabe musicians and failed novelists cling to -- that doesn't jibe with reality.
Breakfast served all day!
"They say alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only disease you can get yelled at for having.
Try catching gonorrhea sometime.
Good point....but remember this is Slashdot, nobody here indulges in the activity that transmits Gonorrhea. :-)
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
A somewhat bad example given a Norwegian just slashed some innocent people.
So I was lucky enough to have been around during those days. I had a small business that resold CP/M. I'd done an implementation for the Northstar Horizon. So I'd see Gary at conferences and trade shows and the hospitality events he threw for his re-sellers. He seemed appreciative and a pretty decent guy. I also got to see the younger Gates regularly. I have to say Bill was a bit harder to like in the early days. The software business for personal computers was a lot different then and it was those early personalities that got us to where we are today. I was sad when I learned how Gary went. He seemed to have deserved much better. I know I'd like to read his entire book as I know I'd not hold anything he wrote later in life against him. He clearly had some demons and definitely missed out on the next wave of the personal computers rise to popularity. So Digital Research is a memory, much like dBase, Novel (sorry, what they became was very different than they were then), MicroPro, and countless companies that bet on the Z-80 over the X86. But I think there would be value in reading Gary's later thoughts even if they may be colored by his personal struggles. I hope someday the rest is released. I sort of feel sorry for folks just getting into computers these days, those earlier times were insanely fun. So many new things emerging. We were drinking from a fire hose then. And Gary was a part of that. I guess thinking about this I should dig out an old Northstar and see if I can still get it to boot CP/M. I doubt I remember any of the command line operations! Good thing I kept all the manuals!
"They say alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only disease you can get yelled at for having.
Try catching gonorrhea sometime.
Good point....but remember this is Slashdot, nobody here indulges in the activity that transmits Gonorrhea. :-)
I have to use a doorknob from time to time. I swear that's how I caught it.
Sounds more like the problem in that story is pot being illegal.
Exactly, it was a literary invention. But what happened? A bunch of sorry, socially deficient nurds picked up the term and started living the delusion that there really was some place called the "cyberspace" outside the real world where they could be "themselves" (i.e. winners instead of losers) and "transcend all borders", hence the ludicrous, childish rant that is the "hacker manifesto" that should be an embarassment to anyone who is more than 11 years old. Surprise surprise, "cyberspace" does not exist, what exist is a service (the internet) that is only possible through the investments of providers, and that has known a couple of decades of almost complete anarchy because laws are notoriously slow to keep up with rapidly advancing tech. But things changed. Now there are laws, and they are enforced. The anarchy is over. The internet is a service and treated as such. There is no "digital frontier". You will never be "winners". Get over it.
Dorothy refused to sign IBM's nondisclosure agreement, on advice of their lawyer (who was there) without consulting her husband (who was not there).
Here you can get the story straight from Jack Sams of IBM who met with Dorothy.
Someone sounds super salty they had to drop out of college because they couldn't hack the Comp sci major. I smell a lot of nerd envy on this guy.
RIP Mitch. Man had a lot of demons. Heroin addict as well.
...yes, but that doesn't mean what he wrote under the influence of alcohol represented his true self, any more than driving under the influence of alcohol represents your true driving ability.
Agreed.
Furthermore, chronic alcoholism results in brain damage and eventually dementia. After some time, chronic alcoholics cannot control their actions anymore than someone experiencing senile dementia. Large and horrific personality changes can occur.
The things they may say in the last 2% of their lives may not be rational, and often in no way accurately represent their thoughts in the previous 98% of their life.
It's *never* lupus.
That is one of the many myths the other was that he was out flying his plane when they came. The real story was that IBM wanted digital research to sign a bunch of NDAs before they would even talk to them and Kildall asked why and they walked. At that time when IBM wants to make a deal with you it was unwise to ask questions.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Gary has no say in how he is remembered?
Ofc dead people don't really have options in this regard, due to being dead, and that people remember what they want, but he put effort into telling people what he thought was important in his life, his relation with alcohol was one of them, even if it was a bad relation it helped shaped him. Maybe he added the bad so that people with other struggles can feel like they can still be a success, and that they are more than their problems. There is more to a message than just the words.
"The only major things that were the API (which was deprecated in 2.x anyway), and, because of the API, the file system had some limitations (drive letters, 8.3 file names) that were similar to CP/M's."
Ummm..... So just the APIs and file system????
Yea....
And version 2.x.....
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
He was drunk, he was a Sommelier after all.
"They say alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only disease you can get yelled at for having.
Try catching gonorrhea sometime.
Good point....but remember this is Slashdot, nobody here indulges in the activity that transmits Gonorrhea. :-)
I have to use a doorknob from time to time. I swear that's how I caught it.
it's all about how you used the doorknob.
wrap that wrascal....
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
CP/M's API was not a copy of VMS. It was influenced by TOPS-10 but the APIs where probably just a small subset.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Are you saying he had a previous criminal conviction?
Novell won a lawsuit against Microsoft for copying CP/M.
MS-DOS version 1 has the same API calls, same directory structure etc.
Stop revisionist history.
> his wife turned them away at the door when they came knocking.
His wife was the VP in charge of OEM negotiations and was the appropriate person to deal with IBM, but the IBM staff were affronted by having to deal with a woman. No she didn't 'turn them away'.
They also required an NDA which DRI were not prepared to enter into.
> MS-DOS was seriously unlike CP/M in almost every way.
MS-DOS 1 was almost identical to CP/M in almost every way.
The structure of BIOS, BDOS, CCP was copied (though for the IBM PC the BIOS was just a stub to the PC's built in BIOS) and the overwriting and reloading of COMMAND.COM was cloned form CP/M's CCP. The API was almost identical, the PSP was a clone of CP/M's first 256 bytes including FCBs. The program structure (only .COMs in MS-DOS 1.x) was the same as CP/Ms .COMs.
The only significant difference was the file system was taken from 'Stand Alone BASIC', which in MS-DOS 1.x was worse than CP/M's. It used the same directory layout, the same FCBs, the same naming, the same permissions, but lacked the user codes and the ability to access hard disks. (Note: sub directories, FAT16, hard disks, .EXEs came with MS-DOS 2).
In fact the origin of MS-DOS: SCP's QDOS is alleged to come about by taking CP/M 1.4 and using an 'annotated disassembly program' (which were available) and putting this through the Intel 8080 -> 8086 ASM converter (also availble). The early SCP-DOS or 86-DOS exhibited an obscure bug in the handling of FCBs involving a file close operation that was in CP/M 1.4 but was fixed in 2.0.
> In practice the two were very, very, very different operating systems.
In practice the two (for MS-DOS 1) were virtually identical which meant that converting Wordstar, Supercalc, dBase II, Peachtree, and all the MS languages to MS-DOS could be automated using the Intel 8080 - 8086 tools plus a small amount of manual changes.
> Different file systems,
Granted, but the file API and FCBs were almost identical.
> different memory management,
Not for MS-DOS 1's .COM 8080 model programs. Later, .EXE was added.
> different command line syntax and approach, different approach to batch files, etc.
Not at all. The command line syntax of MS-DOS 1 was almost identical to CP/M. Some commands were different: COPY instead of PIP, but these were stand alone programs, not part of the OS itself. The built in commands were equivalent. The difference in batch files were because MS-DOS 1 was based on CP/M 1.4 while CP/M was at 2.2.
> As you say, Kildall stole the 'API' from VMS
No. The CP/M API is not at all like VMS. In any can the term 'stole' is quite wrong. 'To steal' is to deny usage to the owner.
DEC did use a utility called PIP which CP/M copied the function of (but not the code) and the command line did use '/'.
> Kildall stole the 'API' from VMS
VMS was released in October 1977, 3 years _after_ CP/M.
Kildall said, Ms-DOS is basically pirated CP/M, except they got the error messages wrong.
I agree with this statement.
> Novell won a lawsuit against Microsoft for copying CP/M.
Huh? First I've heard of it. Citation needed.
> Stop revisionist history.
You might want to take your own advice.
> He was drunk, he was a Sommelier after all.
They just said he was Norwegian?
Nonsense. The wikipedia article says you can catch it by having sex with a man and I have sex with myself every day!
Kildall's family made a decision and they knew him best. I say, respect their decision. There are lots of people who seem to want to know everything about everything these days, and it's not always appropriate.
Kildall's business history is already very well known and he was cursed with being known as one of the big 'losers' in the PC revolution. On a personal level that must have been an albatross for him and his family. Show a little compassion and respect please. Kildall was important in the early days of PCs and that should be enough.
(Note: Not specifically or even generally directed at the parent).
The program APIs were practically identical making ports of 8-bit CP/M programs trivial. Even the file control block structures were the same.