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"Unfortunately Gary’s passion for life also manifested in a struggle with alcoholism, and we feel that the unpublished preface and later chapters do not reflect his true self."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