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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.
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.
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