The Untold Story of Gary Kildall: The Man Who Could Have Ruled PCs

#garykildall #digitalresearch
The year is 1980, and the computer market is going mainstream. Apple has just surpassed 100 000 machines sold and IBM is beginning to take notice. IBM, then the biggest company in the world, decided that it wanted to enter the fast-growing computer market, but because it knew it would take years to release a computer through its rigid bureaucratic corporate structure it decided on a new approach. For it to develop a computer as fast as possible before the market left it behind it used off-the-shelf components from outside companies to put together a computer instead of having everything built in-house which would have taken years to do, among the components it needed was an operating system, instead of build one on its own it reached out to Microsoft which had built a reputation in the industry as a premier software provider, but there was a problem, Microsoft didn’t have an operating system because they had never built one but Bill Gates sent IBM to someone who had one, Gary Kildall the founder of Digital Research, his company was responsible for the most popular microcomputer operating system of the time CP/M. So IBM went to Gary Kildall’s house which was the headquarters of Digital Research but Gary Kildall wasn’t home he was out flying his private plane, the IBM employees who were famously known for being serious suits ended up leaving Gary’s house without an agreement for an operating system. They went back to Bill Gates who this time said he could provide an opening system for them, so they signed a deal. When the IBM PC was released it immediately became the standard for all PCs and Microsoft's PC-DOS became the most dominant operating system in the world as a result Microsoft became the most powerful technology company in the world.

IBM, noticing the growing size of the computer market, decided that it too wanted in on it before it was too late, so it quickly cobbled together a computer using mostly off-the-shelf parts and reached out to Bill Gates for an operating system. IBM initially thought Microsoft made operating systems because of the Apple Softcard, the Apple Softcard was a disk one could buy that was made by Microsoft that enabled Apple computers which featured their own operating system to run programs that were made for the CPM operating system.

He bought one from Tim Patterson who worked at Seattle Computer Products; he had built an operating system that could do everything that CPM could and it also ran on 16-bit computers. He called it the Quick and Dirty Operating System or Q-DOS for short. It was renamed PC-DOS and was licensed to IBM by Microsoft.

[gamewizardks]

Killdall was still a fairly successful guy, but I get that he felt cheated. It's sad to see that he spiraled downward. A brilliant man who was taken advantage of. It's tragic. I really appreciate his contributions to Personal Computing. A true pioneer that should not be forgotten. Sad.

[gamewizardks]

Great video and story. I love the vintage footage here.

[iamgermane]

I had DR-DOS on my PC in the early 1990s. It ran great and I used it with Geoworks Ensemble 3.0, which was like Windows 3.1 and MS Office all rolled into one!

[JesusChrist-is-not-MrNice]

"He was out flying like a pigeon and I like to hunt pigeons for the pleasure." 🤣