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CP/M Creator Gary Kildall's Memoirs Released As Free Download (ieee.org) 157

Posted by BeauHD from the low-low-price-of-free dept.
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.
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CP/M Creator Gary Kildall's Memoirs Released As Free Download More

CP/M Creator Gary Kildall's Memoirs Released As Free Download

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  • Didn't reflect his true self (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04, 2016 @06:06AM (#52642709)

    Cool free censorship.

  • The truth will set you free (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04, 2016 @06:25AM (#52642771)
    > 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 [wikipedia.org].

    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 (Score:5, Funny)

      by quenda ( 644621 ) on Thursday August 04, 2016 @08:22AM (#52643185)

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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Why are you talking about it as if it's some sort of nebulous conspiracy?

      It's pretty clear what happened. IBM was looking for an OS for their new microcomputer. CP/M was the industry standard and the obvious choice, but IBM didn't want to be stuck in the position of paying licensing fees eternal for the OS running on _their_ hardware. Microsoft were a new, up-and-coming company at the time who had seen quite a bit of success commercially with BASIC. Microsoft offered to essentially knock off CP/M, sell it o

  • A redacted memoir then, bad headline. (Score:2)

    by 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 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ICantFindADecentNick ( 768907 ) on Thursday August 04, 2016 @06:40AM (#52642819)
    As we know, censorship is really hard to do well. A copy has already been sold at auction [liveauctioneers.com] 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: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 110010001000 ( 697113 )
      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.

  • Troubled Geniuses (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Phil Katz, this guy, Andre Hedrick, Reiser, that racist Debian guy ... what's the deal with high performing IT people and self-destructive behavior?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "I am so good at writing terse computer code, therefore I am right on every other subject as well."

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

      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: (Score:2)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      what's the deal with .. people and self-destructive behavior?

      FTFY.

  • The full version will appear on Amazon for $19.99 in a few weeks.
  • The entire rest of the book is just a rant about how he was screwed by IBM, Microsoft and DOS.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      DOS was written in just three months and has a lot of similarities to CP/M. Do you honestly think DOS was created without copying interfaces and APIs from CP/M?

  • Kildall was a great guy, but perhaps myopic (Score:3)

    by wcrowe ( 94389 ) on Thursday August 04, 2016 @10:27AM (#52643881)

    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.

    • > I liked Gary Kildall.

        I don't. HIs retarded 8.3 filenames (in 1973) when Apple DOS had 30 character filenames (WITH spaces) back in 1978 set back the industry 22 years. i.e. It took MS until 1995 to support long filenames. If we was smart he would have supported 15 character filenames pascal style: The preceding nibble (or byte) would be the string length.

      --
      Hindsight is 20/20.

      • So it's his fault for not copying somebody else who did something 5 years in the future, and then somebody else copied him for the next 20.

        Wow.

        • You completely missed the point.

          He lacked vision, (let alone intelligence, awareness and knowledge.)

          Anyone designing a file systems asks basic engineering questions:

          * What's the use case?
          * What's the maximum filename length a user would like?
          * If we're going to be stuck with this thing for years how long should filenames be?

          This isn't rocket science, just basic computer science. You can see the complete clusterfuck of idiotic design in the various OS File System Comparisons [wikipedia.org]

          Instead of picking something reas

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by wcrowe ( 94389 )

            He was creating an operating system for a microcomputer -- something running on an 8-bit processor like the Intel 8080 or Zilog Z-80. There was a memory limit of 64K, and early on that 64K was expensive. I mean, if you had the equivalent of a few thousand dollars, in today's money, you could buy a Heathkit H-8 kit, and put it together, and you might be able to afford a 116K machine. If you could also afford a diskette drive, it was probably a hard-sectored, single-sided drive and the diskettes held 90K o

            • > something running on an 8-bit processor like the Intel 8080 or Zilog Z-80. There was a memory limit of 64K, and early on that 64K was expensive.
              > I encourage you to read up on how these old disk systems worked, so that you can understand why someone might limit the size of file names.

              As someone who has *used* those 8-bit computers since the early 80's I'm quite intimate with the details of how all those old DOS's worked -- CP/M, DOS3.3, ProDOS. I'm even writing my own DOS for my 6502 Apple //e, //c

    • The IBM PC was not seen as a strategic move. It was pretty much what an IBM division could put together on a low budget, to cash in on the new and potentially lucrative microcomputer market. It was obviously not going to replace real computers, and if the customer wanted to talk to the mainframe they could buy 3270 terminals (IBM later had PCs that doubled as 3270 terminals). There was no sort of strategic vision at first that said where the IBM PC would fit in. Initially, much PC software ran slower t

  • the first computer I used was an Osbourne 1 running CP/M. Looking forward to reading the chapter...

  • I'd like to see it all (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Space Grrrl ( 1552385 ) on Thursday August 04, 2016 @01:48PM (#52645629)
    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!

    • I had a small business that resold CP/M. I'd done an implementation for the Northstar Horizon.

      I'll have you know that I should in fact have a copy of your implementation, in one of the cupboards in my room, good sir. I used to boot up my Horizons from time to time, in recent years. The hobby lost some steam since my son was born (no time).

      • I hope you do have my CP/M. I was the first one to support 80 track drives and offered some options like opposing sides of the floppy and double stepping to read 40 track media in an 80 track drive. S.A.I.L. CP/M. I can't believe I still remember any of that! :-)

        • I hope you do have my CP/M. I was the first one to support 80 track drives and offered some options like opposing sides of the floppy and double stepping to read 40 track media in an 80 track drive. S.A.I.L. CP/M. I can't believe I still remember any of that! :-)

          Do you remember that the Horizon floppies (and drives) are hard-sectored? That has certainly caused me some headaches back when I started my hobby, as hard sectored floppies are like hen's teeth.

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