Gary Kildall Concepts

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing

by Michael J. Mauboussin · 14 Jul 2012 · 299pp · 92,782 words

. He was fifty-two years old. He is buried in Seattle and has an etching of a floppy disk on his tombstone. His name is Gary Kildall.3 You'd be excused for thinking that the first part of the story is about Bill Gates, the multibillionaire founder of Microsoft. And it

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is certainly tantalizing to ask whether Gary Kildall could have been Bill Gates, who at one point was the world's richest man. But the fact is that Bill Gates made astute decisions

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of Gambling and Statistical Logic, rev. ed. (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1977), xv. Chapter 1—Skill, Luck, and Three Easy Lessons 1. Jeffrey Young, “Gary Kildall: The DOS That Wasn't,” Forbes, July 7, 1997. 2. Harold Evans, They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries

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the Brain of an Elite Athlete: The Neural Processes that Support High Achievement in Sports.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10 (August 2009): 585–596. Young, Jeffrey, “Gary Kildall: The DOS That Wasn't.” Forbes, July 7, 1997. Young, S. Stanley, Heejung Bang, and Kutluk Oktay. “Cereal-Induced Gender Selection? Most Likely Multiple Testing

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer

by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger · 19 Oct 2014 · 459pp · 140,010 words

Hensheid, Andy Hertzfeld, Ted Hoff, Thom Hogan, Rod Holt, Randy Hyde, Peter Jennings, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, Philippe Kahn, Mitch Kapor, Vinod Khosla, Guy Kawasaki, Gary Kildall, Joe Killian, Dan Kottke, Barbara Krause, Tom Lafleur, Jaron Lanier, Phil Lemons, Phil Levine, Andrea Lewis, Bill Lohse, Mel Loveland, Scott Mace, Regis McKenna, Marla

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and academic establishment, built by hackers and hobbyists and seat-of-their-pants entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Lee Felsenstein, Alan Cooper, Steve Dompier, Gary Kildall, Gordon Eubanks, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak working after hours in garages, basements, and bedrooms. These revolutionaries fueled the revolution using their own fascination with

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at the Naval Postgraduate School located down the coast from Silicon Valley, in Pacific Grove, California. Like Osborne, Gary Kildall would be an important figure in the development of the personal computer. * * * Figure 13. Gary Kildall Kildall wrote the first programming language for Intel’s 4004 microprocessor, as well as a control program that

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language for them, let alone a high-level language like PL/M. A friend and coworker of Kildall’s later explained the choice, saying that Gary Kildall wrote PL/M largely because it was a difficult task. Like many important programmers and designers before him and since, Kildall was in it primarily

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and decided they were less than ideal for use as central processors. When he got one of the first 8080 chips from his old friend Gary Kildall, who was teaching computer science down the coast in Monterey and consulting at Intel, Torode began to think seriously about building his own microcomputer. By

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in the minicomputer and peripheral-equipment areas. At Omron, a computer-terminal company that had, coincidentally, just bought the first two of John Torode and Gary Kildall’s microcomputer systems, Millard chatted with a fellow named Ed Faber. Faber was, in some ways, a kindred spirit. Like Millard, the softspoken Faber was

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Building Two, was more aggressively competitive than the company’s director of marketing, Seymour Rubinstein. Miracles and Mistakes I personally consummated the CP/M contract. [Gary Kildall] got a good deal, considering that the Navy was supporting him and he didn’t have any other expenses. –Seymour Rubinstein, software entrepreneur When he

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by the same man who had brought him to California, Bill Millard. * * * Figure 27. Seymour Rubinstein At IMSAI, Rubinstein negotiated sweet deals for software from Gary Kildall, Gordon Eubanks, and Bill Gates. Later he launched his own software company, which brought what-you-see-is-what-you-get functionality to word processing

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a sort of software “reference librarian” to handle storage of the information on the disks. IMSAI bought a disk operating system called CP/M from Gary Kildall, the professor at the Naval Postgraduate School who had written software for Intel’s 4004 chip and had teamed with John Torode to sell computers

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involving years of research by dozens of software specialists. Like most of the early significant programs, it originated out of one person’s initiative. Gary Kildall In mid-1972, Gary Kildall came across an advertisement on a bulletin board that said “MICROCOMPUTER $25.” The item advertised, the Intel 4004, was actually a microprocessor, arguably

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bargain to Kildall. He decided to buy one. Although many of the microcomputer companies’ founders didn’t fit the typical image of an industry leader, Gary Kildall didn’t even act as if he wanted to be in the game. While wrapping up his PhD at the University of Washington, Kildall had

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left him time to program. Kildall had no particular business skills and no real desire to leave academia. He was comfortable just where he was. Gary Kildall also liked to play with computers, and knew a lot about them, in both an academic and a practical, hands-on sense. He had been

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a year, a license for CP/M cost tens of thousands of dollars. * * * Figure 38. Digital Research Staff Tom Rolander (front row), Dorothy McEwen, and Gary Kildall (both in front of the sign) pose with the rest of the Digital Research staff in front of their Pacific Grove, CA, headquarters. (Courtesy of

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Navy submarine. His friend, software designer Alan Cooper, summed it up: “Gordon thrives on tension.” * * * Figure 40. Gordon Eubanks Eubanks’s master’s thesis under Gary Kildall became one of the early industry’s standard programming languages. (Courtesy of Digital Research) Gordon also liked to work hard. When he arrived at the

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Naval Postgraduate School, he soon heard about a professor named Gary Kildall who was teaching compiler theory. Everybody said Kildall was the toughest instructor, so maybe he’d learn something, Eubanks thought. For Eubanks, the hard work

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first West Coast Computer Faire was taking place in San Francisco. Eubanks demonstrated his BASIC-E in a booth he shared with his former professor, Gary Kildall. Alan Cooper and Keith Parsons also showed up and reintroduced themselves to Eubanks. They explained that they had made some modifications in his BASIC and

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far as they knew, and maybe a high-level language. A chat with Peter Hollenbeck at Byte Shop in San Rafael, California, led them to Gary Kildall, CP/M, and Gordon Eubanks. After months of development on Eubanks’s BASIC and their own business software, Cooper and Parsons were ready to start

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of business expertise among its executives was holding back the software industry, Rubinstein felt. He decided that his firm would not sell to manufacturers, as Gary Kildall, Gordon Eubanks, and Bill Gates had been doing, nor would it sell by mail to end users, as Michael Shrayer, Alan Cooper, and Keith Parsons

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years under the business name Compiler Systems. Then in 1981, he sold the company to Digital Research and went to work for his former professor, Gary Kildall, as a Digital Research vice president. Inspired by an entrepreneurial urge he hadn’t really felt when he started Compiler Systems, in 1982 Eubanks left

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Orthodontia. The magazine published, among other material, classic Tiny BASIC implementations by Li-Chen Wang, Tom Pittman (the consultant who had programmed Intel chips before Gary Kildall), and others, along with all the micro news, rumors, and scuttlebutt Warren could unearth. Dr. Dobb’s adopted an irreverent, folksy tone that reflected the

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rather attractive booth staffed by Steve Jobs, Mike Scott, and other Apple executives. Gordon Eubanks demonstrated his BASIC-E in a booth he shared with Gary Kildall. The Commodore PET was also introduced at the event. Sphere had failed to rent booth space, but still made its presence known. The Sphere folks

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enthusiasts and create a perceived need for personal computers within a broader buying public. People had to believe that the machines served a practical purpose. Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system and the subsequent development of business-application software helped some companies sell machines in quantity. But Apple’s operating system

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a variety of contributions to the company and even provided space to work early on. For the operating system, Osborne turned to the industry leader: Gary Kildall’s CP/M. For the programming language, BASIC was the obvious choice. Osborne had two widely used versions to choose from. Because the two BASICs

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Gates sell that to them as well? Gates patiently explained that he didn’t own CP/M, but that he would be happy to phone Gary Kildall and help arrange a meeting. Gates later said that he called Kildall and told him that these were “important customers” and to “treat them right

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writing application programs for the IBM machine had to have the APIs to do their work. That provided a crack in the security through which Gary Kildall managed to see, before the machine was released, what Microsoft’s operating system was like. When he saw the APIs, Kildall realized just how close

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was sold, the purchaser had a choice of operating systems: PC-DOS for $40 or CP/M-86 for $240. If it was a joke, Gary Kildall wasn’t laughing. Software companies quickly began writing programs for PC-DOS. Hardware firms also developed products for the PC. Because PC sales started fast

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systems, not at all an IBM-like move. One crucial part of the system was proprietary, though, and that part was, ironically, the invention of Gary Kildall. Like Michael Shrayer, who had written different versions of his pioneering word processing program for over 80 brands of computers, Kildall had to come up

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

by M. Mitchell Waldrop · 14 Apr 2001

operating system for just seventy-five dollars. Known as CP/M-for Control Program for Microcomputers-it had been created by thirty-three-year-old Gary Kildall, a computer-science teacher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. It was quite similar to DECSYSTEM 10, DEC's original software for the

Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM

by Paul Carroll · 19 Sep 1994

appointm ent for the IBM delegation for the next day in Pacific Grove, California, just off scenic Highway 1, which snakes along the coast. But Gary Kildall, the president of D RI, com m itted a gaffe of epic proportions. The Ph.D. in com puter science was feeling cocky, so when

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. H er little business soon generated $100 million of revenue a year and helped entice people to buy the PC hardware. At the last minute, Gary Kildall and Digital Research Intergalactic resurfaced with a complaint that threatened to derail the software plan. H e had decided that the QDOS that Microsoft had

The Trouble With Billionaires

by Linda McQuaig · 1 May 2013 · 261pp · 81,802 words

the market for them, while growing, was still limited. Gates was successful in the field, but not a leading figure. He was certainly far behind Gary Kildall, a brilliant computer innovator thirteen years his senior who had already developed an operating system, known as Control Program for Microcomputers or CP/M, which

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Mary Gates.) Bill and his mother certainly fitted much more comfortably into the upscale corporate culture of IBM than the hippie-like and free-spirited Gary Kildall. In the end, IBM did a deal with Gates – even though Kildall’s system was clearly superior. Indeed, Kildall, who was years ahead of everyone

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the actual inventor of the operating system of the personal computer, as he’s often celebrated for being. If anyone deserves that title, it’s Gary Kildall. Of course, this is by no means the first time an actual inventor has been nudged aside by a rival who was simply more adept

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playing crucial supporting roles onstage and off. Toward the end of this rather long drama, there’d be an intriguing subplot about how technological innovator Gary Kildall thought he had a deal with IBM, only to discover his friend Bill Gates had sold IBM an adaptation of Kildall’s own operating system

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protecting copyrights in the newly emerging field of computer innovations in the 1980s. Had today’s more rigorous legal standards been in force back then, Gary Kildall would have had strong grounds to sue Gates for copyright infringement, ‌according to writer Harold Evans.11 If Kildall had prevailed in such a lawsuit

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, MA: Perseus Books, 1998), pp. 76–7. 5 Why Bill Gates Doesn’t Deserve His Fortune ‌1 The story of IBM’s early dealings with Gary Kildall and Bill Gates is recounted in Harold Evans, They Made America (New York: Little Brown, 2004), pp. 402–19. See also Steve Hamm & Jay Greene

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words

did not yet make an operating system. It was instead working with one called CP/M (for Control Program for Microcomputers) that was owned by Gary Kildall, a childhood friend of Gates who had recently moved to Monterey, California. So with Sams sitting in his office, Gates picked up the phone and

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

by Leonard Mlodinow · 12 May 2008 · 266pp · 86,324 words

the gist goes like this:12 Gates said he couldn’t provide the operating system and referred the IBM people to a famed programmer named Gary Kildall at Digital Research Inc. The talks between IBM and Kildall did not go well. For one thing, when IBM showed up at DRI’s offices

Licence to be Bad

by Jonathan Aldred · 5 Jun 2019 · 453pp · 111,010 words

size of its mainframe computers, wanted to launch a desktop and needed an operating system. Not only was CP/M the market leader, its creator Gary Kildall was ahead of his rivals, having already developed multitasking. (If this sounds like another era, it was. Kildall’s company was originally called Intergalactic Digital

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry

by Martin Campbell-Kelly · 15 Jan 2003

market share and eventually went out of business. However, a number of individuals who developed software for these machines—including Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Gary Kildall—were to get a first-mover advantage that would give them early dominance of the personal computer software industry. The transforming event for the personal

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as a maker of consumer software. 206 Chapter 7 Operating Systems The first vendor of microcomputer operating systems was Digital Research, founded in 1976 by Gary Kildall (1942–1994).8 In 1972, when the Intel microprocessor first came to his attention, Kildall was a computer science instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School

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observed the growing personal computer software industry and the emergence of retail computer stores as a distribution channel. Having negotiated a CP/M license with Gary Kildall’s Digital Research while with IMS, he saw the significance of using the CP/M platform to broaden the potential customer base of a software

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developments. Its 1985 income was down $20 million from the 1984 peak of $56 million, and it cut its 600member work force by half. Founder Gary Kildall resigned in mid 1985. Only Microsoft and IBM had the resources to persist with a graphical user interface, which would have to wait for the

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president, Gordon Eubanks, 264 Chapter 8 effectively invented the idea of a portfolio of software brands. Eubanks, a former graduate student of Digital Research founder Gary Kildall, was one of the pioneers of the personal computer software industry.69 In 1983, Eubanks, who had briefly been a vice president of Digital Research

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1987 by creating One Source, an organization for supplying business information that could be manipulated by means of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. Gary Kildall and Bill Gates played major roles in establishing a consumer market for CD-ROM media. Kildall was the inventor of the CP/M operating system

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a testament to its growing maturity and strategic vision that in March 1986 it held an industry-wide conference for CD-ROM producers and publishers. Gary Kildall was invited as the keynote speaker— perhaps out of genuine appreciation of his pioneering work, perhaps in an attempt to demonstrate Microsoft’s disinterest in

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, launched in 1987 as Bookshelf. Priced at $295, Bookshelf was targeted at corporate and professional users rather than consumers. When it came out, “it and Gary Kildall’s encyclopedia constituted the entire catalogue of available titles” for home computers.32 Microsoft did not break into the consumer market for CD-ROM encyclopedias

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. Asakura, Revolutionaries at Sony, p. ix. 28. Herz, Joystick Nation; Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames (Fourth Estate, 2000). 29. Interview with Gary Kildall in Susan Lammers, Programmers at Work: Interviews with 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry (Tempus-Microsoft, 1986), pp. 56–69, esp. p. 69. 30

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

by Margaret O'Mara · 8 Jul 2019

point for Silicon Valley’s later dislike of all things Microsoft), the IBM team tried and failed to make a deal with California-based developer Gary Kildall, designer of the operating system, CP/M, that seemed poised to become the market standard. As the whole plan teetered, Gates swooped in, adapting an

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/M, and became a familiar face on public television as the host of The Computer Chronicles before his untimely death at age 52, in 1994. Gary Kildall, Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the History of the Personal Computer Industry, unpublished manuscript in the possession of Scott and Kristen Kildall, reproduced

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online with permission by the Computer History Museum at http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/in-his-own-words-gary-kildall/, archived at https://perma.cc/NU3B-M47B. 6. Rinearson, “Young Students.” 7. Burt McMurtry, interview with the author, January 15, 2015; Leena Rao, “Sand Hill