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.

Comments

Didn't reflect his true self

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool free censorship.

Re:Didn't reflect his true self

[frankenheinz]

No problem. Fan fiction will fill in the blanks.

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[kwoff]

It's his children who decided not to release it, and they explain why:

"Unfortunately Gary’s passion for life also manifested in a struggle with alcoholism, and we feel that the unpublished preface and later chapters do not reflect his true self."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 truth will set you free

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:The truth will set you free

[quenda]

In unrelated news, Bill Gates is set to release his own memoirs in a few days.

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[bloodhawk]

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.

A redacted memoir then, bad headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's already out there

[ICantFindADecentNick]

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..."

Re:It's already out there

[110010001000]

Most successful business people are sociopaths. Gates is no different. I would be kind of surprised if that was the "bad" parts of the memoir. Everyone knows Gates set back the industry 20 years. Is there a full copy anywhere? Sounds interesting. He was central to the Silicon Valley scene at the time.

Re:It's already out there

[110010001000]

Um, you are confused. Anyone can practice censorship. Perhaps you were referring to the 1st Amendment?

Re:It's already out there

[swillden]

Censorship only applies when it's done by the Government. You made a common mistake.

No, anyone who restricts information is engaged in censorship. It may or may not be wrong, and it may or may not be legal, but it's still censorship.

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:Troubled Geniuses

[mwvdlee]

what's the deal with high performing IT people and self-destructive behavior?

The vast majority of high performing IT people don't exhibit self-destructive behaviour and therefore don't make the headlines.

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[Major Blud]

"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

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[squiggleslash]

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.

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[MBGMorden]

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.

Kildall was a great guy, but perhaps myopic

[wcrowe]

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.

Re:Kildall was a great guy, but perhaps myopic

[Space Grrrl]

Ii think you nailed most of the reason for CP/Ms demise in the end. You had to buy it separate of the PC and it was pricey. There really wasn't anything compelling about CP/M compared to PC DOS that would warrant the extra expense. Rather than post twice I'd also add a comment about the 8.3 file names. There was a mindset in the earliest days of personal computers that resources were going to be very limited so there was a definite bias towards smaller and less complex. There also was to some degree a lack of forward vision.

Networking was hardly thought about. I expect a crazy thing I built as a "one off" for a client was a good example. I had a client that needed to find a way to have an office of accountants enter data into a single data store. In this case it was a 15 inch SMD removable platter hard drive that featured a fixed platter and a removable one that was primarily used for back up. (Yes, I also managed to cobble together an 8 inch tape driver interface for back up for another client). The client I did this solution for had a weird accounting system he had written himself over years and did not want to try and replace that. It ran on Northstar Horizons using the Northstar DOS. The hard drive was interfaced through a two board interface from a company in the Phoenix area who I had worked with previously. So a good friend had tried to start his own consulting business taking on the CPA as his first client. He had thought he could build some sort of S-100 bus multiplexer and had spun his wheels for months. So he asked me to bail him out.

What I did (because it really was a sort of DYI culture back then) was get a Polymorphic S-100 chassis, a Northstar Z-80 CPU card which had a ROM socket an 8K static ram card and a Cromenco 8PIO card that gave me a parallel port. Most of the code to access the commands for the disc controller were on ROM on the disk controller. So I reverse engineered the block IO operations from the patched Northstar OS the CPA was using and built a small kernel that I put in ROM on the Z-80 processor card. Then I patched the DOS that booted off of floppy on each individual Northstar computer to change the block IO calls to the disk controller to a routine that used each computers parallel port to talk to a port of the central Polymorphic chassis 8PIO card. Add some cables and some simple code in the Polymorphic based system to do a round robin polling service of each port. Each Northstar worked like it had a local hard drive. The central system fed everything. The final icing on the cake was to add support of a semaphore system resident in the central controller. This allowed for crude file locking system to be added to the system. I called it the "Pollyplexer". Darned if the silly thing didn't work like a champ. That CPA used it for another 4 years, sold the practice and the system and it ran for another 3+ years until it became impossible to keep the disk drive working. It is still one of the most fun things I ever did. :-) It was amazing what you could cobble together if you put your mind to it!

Re: spoon feeding censorship?

[pinkushun]

Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in Neuromancer, with a protagonist who battled with substance abuse. Nothing childish about that.

Re:The rest is just a rant about MS-DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Tim Paterson himself says DOS implements the same Application Program Interface (API) as CP/M.

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[thoromyr]

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.

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[PCM2]

"They say alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only disease you can get yelled at for having.

Try catching gonorrhea sometime.

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[PCM2]

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.

I'd like to see it all

[Space Grrrl]

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!

Re:spoon feeding censorship?

[LWATCDR]

"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.....