I was the public relations account manager for Digital Research, Inc. from 1981 to 1983. I worked with Gary Kildall, Dorothy McEwan, Tom Rolander, Gordon Eubanks and others. I helped launch The Computer Chronicles TV show on which he was co-host. I am so impressed with how comprehensive and well done this documentary is. Bravo!
Oh wow! What an honour it is to receive that kind of acclaim from you! If you would ever like to chat, I'd love to have a few minutes of your time, please let me know if you'd be up for that! Thank you so much for your kind comments!
I was at the Naval Postgraduate school in about 1979 and had the good fortune of being one of his students. He expanded my interest in computers and software, and was instrumental in my education for an eventual career at Bell Labs. He was a true gentleman. He never wanted to dwell on his failures to be more of an influence in the industry.
Al - Thank you for doing this series. Dr Gary Kildall was an amazing inventor, scholar, forward thinker and a highly regarded teacher. I think he is too often overlooked because he didn't do this for money. Yes, he wanted to create something that would offer financial benefit, but I don't think his dream was to be #1 on the Forbes list. The people remembered most are those who gave their time, talent and treasure to make the world a better place than they found it. Gary Kildall was truely one of them.
Loved watching Computer Chronicles episodes with him as co-host. There is a special episode remembering him on TH-cam and Internet Archive - Gary Kildall special
I still enjoy watching the classic reruns. Every time he is on I think what a better operating system he had. I used CPM and thought it was superior to MS DOS
It is really odd how Gary's business dealings with IBM and his untimely death are so shrouded in mystery and rumor that they dwarf his tremendous contributions to computer science.
Just watched an interview Leo Laporte did with Stewart Chefeit about 10 years ago. Stewart said Gary never took a paycheck for co-hosting the show. He did it for no compensation on his own time because he enjoyed the technology. Even with all he knew he wanted to learn more.
Tough to say if Bill Gates would have been Bill Gates without his mom's connections. If you want to make money with your ideas, "thinking them up" is only one of the many steps.
I don't think Gary realized the value of CP/M until it was too late. He wanted to focus more on developing programming tools, and CP/M was something he came up with to make development a bit easier. As soon as companies wanted to license it, that is when he should have realized he was sitting on something big.
It takes more than "realizing the value" of something to make it in the business world. You have to either provide exactly what the customer wants or convince them otherwise.
@@jnharton ibm was trolling for a sucker to take advantage of and Mr Kildall didnt want to play that game. He did right to reject them. Look how ibm behaves today with redhat... they are as despicable as ever.
It seems there was despicable behaviour all round, _possibly_ excepting Gary Kildall. CP/M was expensive which is legitimate, just annoying. DOS was affordable to everyone thanks to some particularly scummy moves by Microsoft and Compaq. ;) And Red Hat? @@snoflahke6575, I was personally harmed by Red Hat's despicable behaviour between 1998 and 2001. Just when I was trying to learn shell scripting and init by example, they made their distro particularly hard to understand and maintain so that more people would buy support contracts. Then Red Hat's influence started to spread. For a while, they had some influence over most Linux distros through GNOME. It got worse: Red Hat paid Lennart Poettering's wages as he developed PulseAudio, DBUS, and SystemD. PulseAudio was merely annoying -- overcomplicated and it didn't do anything new, but it was hyped so people adopted it. DBUS was criticized by someone from Bell Labs with the words, "I can understand why you'd want a system bus, but why would you design it that way?" Then we got SystemD -- unnecessary to experienced Linux admins and promoted with a straight-up _lie_ about log search perfomance. I knew a supercomputer sysadmin who found it impossible to search SystemD logs because the much-vaunted binary log search tool was so extremely slow. Fortunately for him, the freedoms expected in the Linux world do work in some ways; SystemD logd can be configured to output to sysklogd so the logs could be stored in text form and searched with a well-developed, proven, high-speed log search tool: grep. Around 2013, an aquaintance with experience maintaining a wide range of systems made a little illustrative bar graph of the relative amount of work and pay in maintaining Linux, Windows, and VMS servers. It's hard to remember exact proportions after all these years, but the work of maintaining a Windows server was much less than for Linux, and the pay much more. VMS -- VAX Machine System -- originating with Gary Kildall -- was much less work for better pay again. I was already disenfranchised with Linux and its _wunderkinder_ who believe all the hype, even though I had been one of them for too many years. I try to explain Linux's flaws as well as I can, in the hope that others will waste less of their lives on it and the exploiters who manipulate the Linux developer community.
Early 80s I enrolled in an entry level computer science course in college. I was taught CP/M. None of my teachers ever mentioned that DOS was a knock-off of CP/M. When I graduated and I was applying for jobs, potential employers would ask, "Do you have experience with DOS?" I'd reply that I knew CP/M. The response was always the same, "Sorry, we need someone who knows DOS. Thank you." :(
It was the day before one of the Philadelphia personal computer shows opened and I was among the exhibitors getting set up. To save a few bucks it was common to share the carts and hand trucks that had to be rented from the venue, and that's how I met Gary Kildall. It was a time in the fledgling industry where folks knew each other at least by reputation or company and helped each other out. I spent a very enjoyable half-hour just chatting with Gary, who was happy to have somen lend a hand moving his stuff and not trying to pick his brain (which was way above my paygrade!). A really nice brilliant and humble man who took the high road in his business dealings, and we are all better for his journey, short as it was.
I actually had a meeting/interview with Gary. This was around 1985. Some of my friends had created a Unix System 5 port for the IBM PC. He wasn’t a Unix fan. Meanwhile SCO down the coast were eating his lunch. If he were around to see the success of Linux, he’d be eating his words.
Speaking as a former GNU/Linux-lover who broadened his horizons and took note of history, I think Gary Kildall wouldn't be eating his words, he'd be miserable at the state of operating systems. Unix was cheap and a confused mish-mash of different goals. The economics of Linux distribution are so toxic that by 2013, administering a Windows server was less than half the work for more than double the pay over administering a Linux server, and administering a VMS server was much better again. This is the result of support-oriented business backed by investors. There's no freedom where the foundation tools are so hard to work with. Don't let the year fool you into thinking Linux is much better now. In 2013, Linux and "freedom" fanatics had been raving about Linux and how it was "much better now" for over 10 years already. "The year of the Linux desktop" was a big hope at the turn of the century; I was recently astonished to hear it was _still_ considered to be in the future after more than 20 years!
Gary was arrogant and had terrible friends. CP/M was a great idea before its time but he could not convince anyone else to use it. Gary liked to drink and cause trouble. And that's how he spent his last day.
Kildall and Turing both got spectacularly robbed of their rightful credit. Pretty common in history. Most people have never heard of either of them, and instead people who aren't exactly stellar examples of the Human species get all the credit.
The issue is partly over what someone should rightfully be credited for. Inventing or creating something new is one thing, popularizing it and bringing it to the masses is something else entirely. --- Unfortunately people tend to assign credit based on their knowledge and experience, not necessarily on facts. And a good story can often overtake the real details. // At least Gary Kildall didn't have to deal with being a gay man, then losing both his job and social standing on account of it.
Thank you! I've been waiting on the algorithm getting its act together since I started the channel in 2020, but it never seems to happen. It's taken years and most of my major time sink work still only gets very limited views. All I can ask is that people share it on Reddit and other places in the hope that it grows from outside of TH-cam until they wake up!
This was a sad story. One thing that caught my attention was he died the same day as I started my first job after graduating college. Makes me wonder if he was a topic of conversation around the office that week.l
6:03 Kildall graduated from the *University of Washington* in _Seattle, Washington,_ and subsequently taught at the United States *Naval Postgraduate School* (NPS) located in _Monterey, California._ (Different schools in different states, more than 900 miles apart). After completing postgraduate doctoral work at his Washington alma mater, he returned to teaching at NPS in California. Very well done documentary 👍 Cheers
@ 17:49 INT21h is not correct. MSDOS on the IBM pc uses int21h to call a dos function. INTXX does not exist on a Z80/8080 CPU. They use a RST instruction, even thst is not used on CP/M CP/M uses CALL 5 as an api entry for BDOS calls LD DE,parameter LD C,function CALL 5 ....... For a 808X cpu 16bit MOV DX,parameter MOV CL,function INT 0E0h
You are missing major points Bills Daddy was an intellectual rights attorney- Microsoft initially was was a computer language company focusing mostly on Basic. Microsoft Basic was already with the Apple II. IBM had already contracted with Microsoft to provide Basic for the IBM PC; but - Microsoft could only provide it on time IF the OS was essentaily identical in calls to CPM because Microsoft had already developed Basic for CPM. When Kidell failed to reach terms with IBM; Microsoft was in a giant bind. So Microsoft had to Rip off CPM to honor the Basic language contract; the first version of MS DOS was 95+% identical to CPM. Digital research sued and won, but the award was limited to the first version;. Microsoft had quickly improved the code for the next version and was not held liable for damages for subsequent versions.
I think Gary Kildall would have been the Elon Musk of the computer industry. Even with the trouble between him and IBM and Microsoft . I believe given time, Gary would have over come them all.
You'd be surprised how often very large competitors like MS, Google, IBM, and Apple cooperate. For example, Google still pays Apple to keep Google as the default search engine in Safari, and Microsoft somewhat recently integrated the Chrome rendering engine into their Edge browser.
It's even crazier when it comes to hardware like half the parts in every Iphone coming from Samsung, or Sony using LG's OLED panels in all of their televisions.
Both Edge and Chrome browsers are based on Chromium, an open-source project. I use another Chromium-based browser called Brave which has a built-in ad-blocker activated by default that allows me to watch TH-cam videos ad-free.
Great story Ali, I do remember a lot of this, but it is full of twists and turns. Gary was the great engineer and before his time , a nice guy, but these dealings with IBM/Microsoft left a lasting impression on him which I believe led him towards his sad end. Waiting for next episode before any more potential spoiler comments. Great Job
I have used both cpm and concurrent cpm operating systems and I can say that concurrent cpm was truly revolutionary because it could multitask a 8088 processor into a multi user computer like a minicomputer that existed in the 70s.
@@AlsGeekLab i had an 8088 processor in my used tandy 1000. i had no idea about the hx of dos but i did def like dr dos best. What did i do with it? Upgraded to ega graphics and played forgotten realms dos games on it! Woo! look at all the pretty colors!
Gary Kildall received the Milestone recognition from the IEEE for his work - that included creating a system to inform the OS about the hardware the computer has. We call it BIOS.
Still i wonder what could have been if Garys life wasnt cut so short. His opportunity would have certainly come to claim the throne. I imagine a chance to really stick the knife back at Billy would have been in the cards too. RIP Gary, youll never be forgotten!
No. He missed his chances, which had been handed to him on the proverbial silver platter, when he blew off IBM. And that mistake is 100% on Gary and his wife. Their own arrogance cost them the literal world, and from there the only way for Gary to go was down.
@@looneyburgmusic Big Blue would want you to believe they were blown off by Gary. Reality is, they were well aware what they were doing and it was all strategic fuckery if you ask me.
@@AllboroLCD no, it wasn't. It was how they did business. That's the other bit the Gary Cheerleaders always forget to mention - back in that era, even us kids who were involved in the world of computers knew what IBM was, and how they operated. Back then, IBM was Apple + Google + Microsoft of today, all rolled into one. Just not as nice
@@AllboroLCD Gary might have been an amazing programmer, (and he was), but a "visionary" he was not. In his dealings with IBM he made the fatal mistake of sticking with the "old" way of thinking about computers, and thinking that IBM was just another potential CP/M customer, instead of THE company that would start a computer revolution...
Excellent work on a brilliant man. We had quite a large CPM enclave here in Australia, so I started on the CPM side before DOS came along. The original Spectravideo machines came with both CPM from Digital Research and SVI Disk Basic, created in cooperation with Microsoft, which itself then became part of MSX Disk Basic along with MSX-DOS the 8-bit version of MS-DOS.
Networking to the PC industry out of the main frame model but was still a business oriented device throughout the eighties and nineties. The PC was never supposed to take off, heck Bill Gates proclaimed that 240k of RAM would be more than sufficient memory to build a microprocessing platform around. I purchased a Tandy Clone in the mid eighties for north of $2k, suffice it to say that few people I knew had these devices. The world wide web is what has made the computer ubiquitous and in the early days of Microsoft and pre Google, this internet was not on anyones radar. Bill Gates never thought the PC would go beyond the realm of the few pencil neck geeks that were thrilled to program punch cards to make printouts of Snoopy.
Another fantastic video and this series is going to be great, based on this first part being excellent. Thank you for doing this and I look forward to the next part.
@@w.alan.21 It is necessary. But it has to be well balanced, i.e. when there is no narration or dialogue, the music volume increases, when there's dialogue again, music goes down. It's a simple concept but it's not so easy to execute it correctly.
He was Tesla of the computer world. Wanted to give to people, a noble soul, a total opposite to his greedy profit driven rival, who wants to depopulate the world.
So glad you enjoyed it! Thank you so much for your kind super thanks! Totally unexpected but I accept these as verification that I'm doing work that entertains others in the right way. ☺️. It took over 5 months for me to make this docu-series and I'm glad it's going down well !
Gary was quite a guy. With his CP/M and the, (not so well known) MP/M (multi-user system.) I got to be one of the first to use it with dBASE! He was located in Monterrey, CA next to KSBW TV.
I remember seeing the price list for the original IBM PC, CPM was listed, due to an agreement compensating for Microsoft conflict with CPM copyright) the CPM price was more than twice the more buggy Windows price. Apparently the agreement just required it to be offered, the price may not have been specified.
Kildall was such an important figure during the early history of PCs. He was smarter than Gates (and Gates was very smart) but he wasn't a shark. Urge everyone to read/listen to Fire in the Valley
I was able to break the BASIC used on our school's CP/M machine using simple file I/O operations, all I had to do was open a file on floppy, access it, close the file, and repeat. It didn't take long - just several times - and it would (IIRC) hard lock the machine. The teacher didn't believe me and insisted I'd done something wrong, until he proof read my code, and I proved it with a simple stripped down program. I was forced to move my project to a BBC Micro and adjust the I/O code using nothing more than the paper manual it shipped with, as we didn't have a disk drive for the BBC yet - and when a drive eventually arrived, it worked properly first time :-)
IBM wanted Gary's wife to sign an NDA before they would even tell her why they were in the office asking for a meeting. Gary was flying back from another meeting and since this was all before cell phones, never mind cell phone calling airplanes, she wouldn't sign so IBM left and went back to Bill and enquired about an OS not just the original plan for programming languages from MSFT
"IBM wanted Gary's wife to sign an NDA..." - Because that was how IBM worked. It was her own arrogance which led her to refuse. And Gary wasn't, "flying back from another meeting," he was just out flying.
I think the biggest mistake Gary made was his misconception about Microsoft in the early days -- thinking they just made programming langauges and Gary made OSes, and probably the idea that MS would "never" get into OSes. So he was gone when the IBM execs showed up and the meeting happened between his lawyer, his wife and the IBM people while Gary was traveling, and I think this was a huge mistake on his part (not the travel, but not delaying the meeting if he could, but rather having his lawyer go through with it without him there; not sure if he was on the phone during the meeting or not but as we all know, it didn't go as planned or as Gary probably hoped). But again, I think part of it comes back to his naive thinking that MS wasn't really a direct competitor (obviously, CP/M was designed out of convenience and not necessarily initially to be a mass marketed product to the public, but rather something Gary did for himself and others around him as he had a need for an OS). Although likely CPM would have lost steam much like DOS did when the GUI era came around with the Xerox Alto, and thus Apple and Microsoft developing GUIs. So it ineveitably would have faded away, although it may have changed the dynamic of the OS market even today. I'm thinking MS would have probably still done an OS (DOS) but perhaps later.
@17:52 is incorrect! CP/M did not use INT to make calls to the BIOS. It couldn't possibly do so. Software interrupts weren't available on the 8080 and Z-80 cpus that CP/M ran on. The INT instruction or software interrupt was introduced with the 8086. It was DOS that made use on INT21h and that specific INT was used by applications to make calls to DOS itself. DOS did make BIOS calls using INT but not INT21h. Also later on in the video you state that the 8088 was a "cut down" version of the 8086. I guess that's debatable depending on how you define "cut down". However, the only real difference is that the 8088 has an external bus that's only physically 8 bits wide. That made the motherboard cheaper, not so much the CPU.
knowing people that met Bill Gates in the 70s / 80s, Bill Gates would have always been Bill Gates even if DR DOS was the default install for the IBM PC. MS Excel would have still been created and MS may have even created Windows earlier because you can argue due to the success of MS DOS, there was not the same impetus.
Ya Steven; it wasn't just inspired it was 95+% the same exact code, Seattle Computer had the CP/M source which Kidall was very bad at protecting. There was next to zero 16bit code in QDOS and basically ran as CP/M 80 in 8 bit mode. This was disclosed in a court case against Microsoft by CP/M maker Digital Research; and DR won; but they only got an award of about $95,000 because they couldn't demonstrate that the early DOS variants had lost DR that much revenue, and later versions were markedly different with many 16bit components for addressing etc, so they were unable to prove those versions were infringing. The fact Microsoft became the licensor for the IBM PC with the rip of product wasn't relevant to the court.
A couple of years ago, I followed signs to an estate sale in Seattle. It turned out it was for Gary Kildall's mother, and was being run by his sister. We had some interesting conversation. She gave me a book from the sale - Bill Gates' 'The Road Ahead!'
Nolan (Atari) or Jack Tramiel were the best businessmen in the industry, if they hadn't been kicked out ot the companies they started they would have done more than the already had. One made the home gaming revolution/cheap computer technology in the home a fact, the other pushed that to breaking point and owned the company that produced the low low priced 6502 CPU....which was the PS5 AMD APU of it's day.
Kildall is no Bill Gates. And could never have outdone what Gates did. It takes more than being a good engineer to come out on top in the micro software business.
Presumably one of the most gifted computer programmers in the early days of computing. Yet Gary failed miserably in terms of good luck and fortune. I guess that’s life 😮
Not necessarily good luck I would say, but just poor decision making when it came to the IBM deal and his perception of where Digital Research and MS stood in terms of product offerings and him not seeing MS as a competitor even though they were in different markets.
I sometimes wonder if people who make videos like this do any research at all. I wrote software for CP/M. There is no interrupt 21h on an 8080 processor and that therefore could not have been the way in which the operating system was called. You called address 0005 after loading C with a number indicating the function required. Later versions which ran on an 8086 used int 0E0h for OS calls.
If you listen to the programmer himself, Tom Rollander, he mentions specifically int21. I spent months doing research as you will see from all the sources cited on part 3s end credits.
@@AlsGeekLabThen there are two alternatives: Either he has forgotten or you misinterpreted what he said. The 8080 processor does not have an INT 21h instruction. The closest instructions to this on the 8080 are the RST 0 through 8 instructions, but they were mostly intended for use by hardware interrupts and they were not used by CP/M. With CP/M you used CALL 0005 to call the operating system. You can confirm this by looking up the 8080 instruction set and the CP/M reference manuals yourself. I have not misremembered this. I have in front of me original printed paper copies of both the CP/M User Manual from 1978 and an MP/M-86 OS Programmer's Guide from 1981. The former clearly documents a call to 0005h as being the entry point to BDOS for 8080 CP/M while the later clearly documents int 0E0h as being used as the entry point for 8086 versions of the OS. Look it up yourself.
@@DavidHembrow I agree with you. I was also caught off gaurd by the mention of INT 21h. I have restored and built a few s100 computers that I still own. I am pretty familiar with how cp/m does it's thing on an 8080/z80, as well as programming for the 8080. Biggest givaway is there is no INT command for the 8080. I also have the asm source and full documentation for the Ithaca Intersystems DPS-1 CP/M BIOS. (Edit: Just confirmed in the manual to be sure. A system call is indeed a jump to BOOT+0005h. No INT21h. Isn't that an MS/DOS thing?)
If you look at the introduction of the ATARI ST on Computer Chronicles , you can see the biggest grin on his face because they used his OS which was better the Microsoft AND Mac OSs .
I did use DRDOS at times as it had better DIR function, doskey type command line history, and better memory managment. But inevitability found some compatibility problems, especially with games. MSDOS then brought these features in, so there wasnt a good reason to run DRDOS anymore. Whilst ir may be a sliding door moment for Gary v Bill, it's the entrepreneurial talents and business strategies (and killer instinct) that allows Gates/Jobs and other "tycoons" to still win out. Gates probably would have just found the next innovation or market .
I was a big fan of DRDOS. I think that if it weren't for DRDOS, MSDOS would have stagnated at v3.1. DRDOS forced Microsoft to incorporate its useful features. In fact, Microsoft stole from small developers to quickly add features to be able to compete with DRDOS. There were several versions of MSDOS 6 due to lawsuits until they were able to develop their own versions of these features. In order to dissuade users from using DRDOS, Microsoft went so far as to program Windows 3.1 to detect DRDOS and refuse to run if it was detected, even though it was fully compatible!
@@knavekid I was working at Datalight with CEO Roy Sherrill in 92-94 Bothell and then in 94 Arlington Washington, they had a ROMDOS 3 that booted from floppy disk and we tested running Windows 3.1 on top of ROMDOS. We saw that same problem that prevented Windows 3.1 running on ROMDOS 3. From a note,article we changed our ROMDOS to run the same way as MSDOS and got Windows 3.1 to work. YES , Bill Gates, was trying to kill competition DRDOS 5 from running Windows 3.1 .
Unfortunately, the very restaurant at which Gary Kildal got his fatal blow no longer exists today. It’s replaced by a British restaurant owned by a British couple since mid 2000s and frequented mainly by British and European tourists. I was surprised when I dared once to enquire some staff and the cashier about the incident. They told me they knew nothing about Gary Kildal or history of the previous restaurant that had occupied the same place.
For years I thought Gary Kildall was just a computer journalist and had no idea he was the genius behind CP/M. His death was tragic, I'm sure the only reason he took to hanging around in dodgy bars was because he was shafted by his contemporaries.
Gary wasn't "shafted" by anyone but himself. While he might have been a genius-level programmer, he had zero business sense, and that is why he lost his chance at working with IBM.
There was a great tool on CP/M, called "sweep". Has anyone run across something similar for Linux or Windows? The specific feature I miss is copying files from one disk to another, sorted descending by size, and prompting for new media every time the target runs out of space.
If Kildall was more of a businessman and less of a techie he might have gotten the IBM deal. OTOH, if he wasn't a such techie, Gates wouldn't have had anything to sell IBM in the first place.
Haha, I've never thought about that! I don't think I've ever talked about Jay-Z in my life, but I've probably talked about Zee-Zee top a fair few times, probably because I heard an American call them Zee-Zee. But I made Zed-80 in my head, as a British-English speaker, Z is Zed, so Zed 80 makes sense.. I'd never heard anyone American say Zee-80 before. But now you say it, it is an American invention, so I guess it should be called Zee-80!
@@AlsGeekLab I posted that mostly in jest. I've lived both in the States and the UK and I know I've said "zee" in the UK and "zed" in the US inadvertently. I grew up in the early 80's in the States so I guess that's why I say zee-80, but I lived in London for a few summers and had a friend there who had a zed-x Spectrum. We did have the same computer in the US but it was called the Timex Sinclair or something like that. Great video, btw. I used to see Gary Kildall on Computer Chronicles back in the day and it was clear he had revolutionary ideas. Part of me wonders if he was just too nice of a guy. People like Bill Gates end up at the top of the pecking order because they elbow other people out of the way. I think even if Gary would have signed with IBM initially, Gates and Microsoft would have probably ended up developing MS-DOS from 86-DOS eventually (once they saw how much money Digital was making from CP/M-86). They would have found a way to make 86-DOS binary compatible with CP/M-86 (in much the same way Digital transformed their OS into DR-DOS making it compatible with MS-DOS).
History is littered with people that never got the credit (or income) for their creations. It's also littered with myopic types that bottleneck progress.
I think what really made Gates rich is Compaq computer in making a legal clone IBM compatible (and in many ways better) BIOS. Now Gates could sell MS-DOS as Microsoft retained ownership, but from an IBM standpoint this didn't matter because you could never legally use or license the IBM BIOS which it needed to run. So why own the rights if it can only be used in the IBM PC.
Thank you for this set of videos. It was a very in-depth review of what happened, both real and apocryphal. Very sad ending to the story. I think I would have gotten along well with Gary Kildall. During the early 90's, I wrote for PC Magazine and went to COMDEX where I met Bill Gates in '90 then in '91. If I had seen this, I may have thought differently about shaking his hand.
How expensive would a 2nd Z80 be in the days? Using one for code and the other for screen by presenting each of them a shifted clock so one cpu is T1 and the other in say T2/T3? Or would that clash in the end? Bus logic and the 2nd cpu would propably kill the price
IBM was the 800 pound gorilla in computing. In terms of PCs, whoever was able to partner with IBM was going to dominate personal computing OS marketshare in the near term.
Although you add to the documentary I don't see any credit given to the documentary you use extensively: Triumph of the Nerds 1996 ‧ Documentary - you really should give credit to them for your video
There is credit throughout the video to the excerpts used for triumph of the nerds, both in the video itself, as well as in the description and in the credits at the end of the documentary in part 3. Every source was carefully attributed.
There's something I'm not getting it. Why to create the Z-80 Softcard if Gary already designed the BIOS and stuff? Wouldn't be easier (and cheaper) to compile CP/M for the MOS 6502 as he did for the Z-80?
Compatibility! Much of the software was written in assembly language ( 8080 or 6502 or 6809 Color Computer). Too hard to convert by hand from one 8080 computer system to a 6502 System) 32K, 48K, or 64 kilobytes for 8080 and 6502, memory just too small. Now these days with Great GNU C and CLANG compilers and many Gigabytes of dram. Easy to convert. Look at early history of Debian Linux 1992-94 and how they started creating a Linux distro in 1993 for the PC 80386 486 and 68000 cpus and grew to support many different target achitectures, sparc, mips, arm. 4 Megabytes of DRAM on a 68000 cpu in 1985 was huge.
The intel 8080 (or the generally compatible Z80) was the CPU that CP/M was made for. Converting it to a 6502 or other non-similar cpu (i.e. Motorola 68k or 6809) would have been a very time consuming task. Basically, you'd almost have to write it from scratch back in those days, which would have taken probably 6-12 'man' months minimum I'd reckon. Putting an (even then) relatively inexpensive daughter-cpu in the Apple II was a simple hardware upgrade.. kinda akin to putting the Apple II card in the Macintosh Performa was, many years later. Cheap, easy and generally, it just worked.
@@AlsGeekLab Maybe I overestimated what level of abstraction he accomplished with the BIOS. I though he was also abstracting from the CPU, not general I/O hardware (periferics) only. Didn't realize cross-compiling is newer than that era.
Gary don't have the mindset to become billionaire and will not be like Bill Gates. While Bill Gates is thinking "if I can get $1 from every copy of MS-DOS from 1 billion IBM PC users. I will become a billionaire". Gary's thinking is "I must get $75 from each copy of DR-DOS for all the hard work that I have done". In the end, Bill Gates become billionaire and Gary didn't become billionaire .
Please note. An inventor does not always get the benefit of his creation. Check out who started McDonalds Hamburgers. Check out who really made the Model T. Check out how Edison stole the movie camera from French inventors.
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I was the public relations account manager for Digital Research, Inc. from 1981 to 1983. I worked with Gary Kildall, Dorothy McEwan, Tom Rolander, Gordon Eubanks and others. I helped launch The Computer Chronicles TV show on which he was co-host. I am so impressed with how comprehensive and well done this documentary is. Bravo!
Oh wow! What an honour it is to receive that kind of acclaim from you! If you would ever like to chat, I'd love to have a few minutes of your time, please let me know if you'd be up for that!
Thank you so much for your kind comments!
I was at the Naval Postgraduate school in about 1979 and had the good fortune of being one of his students. He expanded my interest in computers and software, and was instrumental in my education for an eventual career at Bell Labs. He was a true gentleman. He never wanted to dwell on his failures to be more of an influence in the industry.
❄
HE did dwell though. That is part of the reason that he died the way he did.
@@Desert-edDave?
He was not a failed man. He sold his company for $120million dollars. He was richer than most of the “commenter” on TH-cam
Al - Thank you for doing this series. Dr Gary Kildall was an amazing inventor, scholar, forward thinker and a highly regarded teacher. I think he is too often overlooked because he didn't do this for money. Yes, he wanted to create something that would offer financial benefit, but I don't think his dream was to be #1 on the Forbes list. The people remembered most are those who gave their time, talent and treasure to make the world a better place than they found it. Gary Kildall was truely one of them.
You'll like part 2 and 3 then... you'll see my conclusion aligns with yours!
To that end I give you Linus Torvalds. He achieved in his operating system what Gary visioned
@@Ac_AdapterI would cal, if a polite way of saying it
Loved watching Computer Chronicles episodes with him as co-host. There is a special episode remembering him on TH-cam and Internet Archive - Gary Kildall special
I still enjoy watching the classic reruns. Every time he is on I think what a better operating system he had.
I used CPM and thought it was superior to MS DOS
That's how you knew he was a class act. He wasn't above co-hosting a little program like that. He cared about the tech, more than the billions.
gary kildall is the unsung hero of the personal computer revolution - thx for telling his story. 🙏
Glad you liked it! Please share on social media if you can!
It is really odd how Gary's business dealings with IBM and his untimely death are so shrouded in mystery and rumor that they dwarf his tremendous contributions to computer science.
bill gates mom ran IBM she was a board member who constanly to IBM to NOT make laptops!!
And he didn't need to be on Computer Chronicles but apparently loved being there.
Just watched an interview Leo Laporte did with Stewart Chefeit about 10 years ago. Stewart said Gary never took a paycheck for co-hosting the show. He did it for no compensation on his own time because he enjoyed the technology. Even with all he knew he wanted to learn more.
Tough to say if Bill Gates would have been Bill Gates without his mom's connections. If you want to make money with your ideas, "thinking them up" is only one of the many steps.
I don't think Gary realized the value of CP/M until it was too late. He wanted to focus more on developing programming tools, and CP/M was something he came up with to make development a bit easier. As soon as companies wanted to license it, that is when he should have realized he was sitting on something big.
It takes more than "realizing the value" of something to make it in the business world. You have to either provide exactly what the customer wants or convince them otherwise.
@@jnharton ibm was trolling for a sucker to take advantage of and Mr Kildall didnt want to play that game. He did right to reject them. Look how ibm behaves today with redhat... they are as despicable as ever.
It seems there was despicable behaviour all round, _possibly_ excepting Gary Kildall. CP/M was expensive which is legitimate, just annoying. DOS was affordable to everyone thanks to some particularly scummy moves by Microsoft and Compaq. ;) And Red Hat? @@snoflahke6575, I was personally harmed by Red Hat's despicable behaviour between 1998 and 2001. Just when I was trying to learn shell scripting and init by example, they made their distro particularly hard to understand and maintain so that more people would buy support contracts.
Then Red Hat's influence started to spread. For a while, they had some influence over most Linux distros through GNOME. It got worse: Red Hat paid Lennart Poettering's wages as he developed PulseAudio, DBUS, and SystemD. PulseAudio was merely annoying -- overcomplicated and it didn't do anything new, but it was hyped so people adopted it. DBUS was criticized by someone from Bell Labs with the words, "I can understand why you'd want a system bus, but why would you design it that way?" Then we got SystemD -- unnecessary to experienced Linux admins and promoted with a straight-up _lie_ about log search perfomance. I knew a supercomputer sysadmin who found it impossible to search SystemD logs because the much-vaunted binary log search tool was so extremely slow. Fortunately for him, the freedoms expected in the Linux world do work in some ways; SystemD logd can be configured to output to sysklogd so the logs could be stored in text form and searched with a well-developed, proven, high-speed log search tool: grep.
Around 2013, an aquaintance with experience maintaining a wide range of systems made a little illustrative bar graph of the relative amount of work and pay in maintaining Linux, Windows, and VMS servers. It's hard to remember exact proportions after all these years, but the work of maintaining a Windows server was much less than for Linux, and the pay much more. VMS -- VAX Machine System -- originating with Gary Kildall -- was much less work for better pay again. I was already disenfranchised with Linux and its _wunderkinder_ who believe all the hype, even though I had been one of them for too many years. I try to explain Linux's flaws as well as I can, in the hope that others will waste less of their lives on it and the exploiters who manipulate the Linux developer community.
He was too good of a guy, brilliant but not cut throat enough. He's more akin to Wozniak than Gates or Jobs.
Early 80s I enrolled in an entry level computer science course in college. I was taught CP/M. None of my teachers ever mentioned that DOS was a knock-off of CP/M. When I graduated and I was applying for jobs, potential employers would ask, "Do you have experience with DOS?" I'd reply that I knew CP/M. The response was always the same, "Sorry, we need someone who knows DOS. Thank you." :(
It was the day before one of the Philadelphia personal computer shows opened and I was among the exhibitors getting set up. To save a few bucks it was common to share the carts and hand trucks that had to be rented from the venue, and that's how I met Gary Kildall. It was a time in the fledgling industry where folks knew each other at least by reputation or company and helped each other out. I spent a very enjoyable half-hour just chatting with Gary, who was happy to have somen lend a hand moving his stuff and not trying to pick his brain (which was way above my paygrade!). A really nice brilliant and humble man who took the high road in his business dealings, and we are all better for his journey, short as it was.
Lovely story!
I actually had a meeting/interview with Gary. This was around 1985. Some of my friends had created a Unix System 5 port for the IBM PC. He wasn’t a Unix fan. Meanwhile SCO down the coast were eating his lunch. If he were around to see the success of Linux, he’d be eating his words.
Too bad he wasn't a Unix fan, if he had worked on a Unix port to the PC before xenix/sco took hold, it might have been cool. Might. 😁
@@AlsGeekLab The very next day, I visited SCO for an interview. There was a hot tub in the lobby! 😂
Speaking as a former GNU/Linux-lover who broadened his horizons and took note of history, I think Gary Kildall wouldn't be eating his words, he'd be miserable at the state of operating systems. Unix was cheap and a confused mish-mash of different goals. The economics of Linux distribution are so toxic that by 2013, administering a Windows server was less than half the work for more than double the pay over administering a Linux server, and administering a VMS server was much better again. This is the result of support-oriented business backed by investors. There's no freedom where the foundation tools are so hard to work with. Don't let the year fool you into thinking Linux is much better now. In 2013, Linux and "freedom" fanatics had been raving about Linux and how it was "much better now" for over 10 years already. "The year of the Linux desktop" was a big hope at the turn of the century; I was recently astonished to hear it was _still_ considered to be in the future after more than 20 years!
It was Kildall vs Gates that taught me you don’t have to make the best product, you just have to be relentless about your product.
He was not prepared for bill gates and his unhinged unethical strategies .he thought he could just make the best product and win.
Who stole Gates' basic tape?🤣
And look at him. Hardly anyone knows him and he is dead. This world is run by criminals.
Gates didn't do anything unethical.
Indeed.
Gary was arrogant and had terrible friends. CP/M was a great idea before its time but he could not convince anyone else to use it.
Gary liked to drink and cause trouble. And that's how he spent his last day.
Kildall and Turing both got spectacularly robbed of their rightful credit. Pretty common in history. Most people have never heard of either of them, and instead people who aren't exactly stellar examples of the Human species get all the credit.
Strange how history keeps repeating itself!
The issue is partly over what someone should rightfully be credited for. Inventing or creating something new is one thing, popularizing it and bringing it to the masses is something else entirely. --- Unfortunately people tend to assign credit based on their knowledge and experience, not necessarily on facts. And a good story can often overtake the real details. // At least Gary Kildall didn't have to deal with being a gay man, then losing both his job and social standing on account of it.
This deserves far more views than it's gotten. Algorithm needs to get its act together.
Thank you! I've been waiting on the algorithm getting its act together since I started the channel in 2020, but it never seems to happen. It's taken years and most of my major time sink work still only gets very limited views. All I can ask is that people share it on Reddit and other places in the hope that it grows from outside of TH-cam until they wake up!
@@AlsGeekLab I have no sway anywhere but I wonder if a post over at vcf forums or something might give it a boost too.
I loved DR-DOS back in the day but I didnt know how much their influence on computing extended beyond that. Fascinating docu!
This was a sad story. One thing that caught my attention was he died the same day as I started my first job after graduating college.
Makes me wonder if he was a topic of conversation around the office that week.l
6:03 Kildall graduated from the *University of Washington* in _Seattle, Washington,_ and subsequently taught at the United States *Naval Postgraduate School* (NPS) located in _Monterey, California._ (Different schools in different states, more than 900 miles apart). After completing postgraduate doctoral work at his Washington alma mater, he returned to teaching at NPS in California.
Very well done documentary 👍
Cheers
Great clarification! thank you!
@ 17:49 INT21h is not correct. MSDOS on the IBM pc uses int21h to call a dos function.
INTXX does not exist on a Z80/8080 CPU. They use a RST instruction, even thst is not used on CP/M
CP/M uses CALL 5 as an api entry for BDOS calls
LD DE,parameter
LD C,function
CALL 5
.......
For a 808X cpu 16bit
MOV DX,parameter
MOV CL,function
INT 0E0h
You are missing major points Bills Daddy was an intellectual rights attorney- Microsoft initially was was a computer language company focusing mostly on Basic. Microsoft Basic was already with the Apple II. IBM had already contracted with Microsoft to provide Basic for the IBM PC; but - Microsoft could only provide it on time IF the OS was essentaily identical in calls to CPM because Microsoft had already developed Basic for CPM. When Kidell failed to reach terms with IBM; Microsoft was in a giant bind. So Microsoft had to Rip off CPM to honor the Basic language contract; the first version of MS DOS was 95+% identical to CPM. Digital research sued and won, but the award was limited to the first version;. Microsoft had quickly improved the code for the next version and was not held liable for damages for subsequent versions.
I think you need to watch part 2 and 3 of this documentary!
I think Gary Kildall would have been the Elon Musk of the computer industry. Even with the trouble between him and IBM and Microsoft . I believe given time, Gary would have over come them all.
You'd be surprised how often very large competitors like MS, Google, IBM, and Apple cooperate. For example, Google still pays Apple to keep Google as the default search engine in Safari, and Microsoft somewhat recently integrated the Chrome rendering engine into their Edge browser.
It's even crazier when it comes to hardware like half the parts in every Iphone coming from Samsung, or Sony using LG's OLED panels in all of their televisions.
Both Edge and Chrome browsers are based on Chromium, an open-source project. I use another Chromium-based browser called Brave which has a built-in ad-blocker activated by default that allows me to watch TH-cam videos ad-free.
Yeah Gary's story is kind of sad tbh. He seemed to be a man of principle.
Great story Ali, I do remember a lot of this, but it is full of twists and turns. Gary was the great engineer and before his time , a nice guy, but these dealings with IBM/Microsoft left a lasting impression on him which I believe led him towards his sad end. Waiting for next episode before any more potential spoiler comments. Great Job
Thanks Bill! Yep the concluding two episodes cover all the drama! Next video out tomorrow morning!
I have used both cpm and concurrent cpm operating systems and I can say that concurrent cpm was truly revolutionary because it could multitask a 8088 processor into a multi user computer like a minicomputer that existed in the 70s.
I think there are a lot of people out there who don't get how revolutionary it was, especially on a crippled 8088 CPU
@@AlsGeekLab i had an 8088 processor in my used tandy 1000. i had no idea about the hx of dos but i did def like dr dos best. What did i do with it? Upgraded to ega graphics and played forgotten realms dos games on it! Woo! look at all the pretty colors!
He was not greedy enough and business loves greedy people.
Really ambitious topic to cover in a video, but it's important to keep this story alive. It's very good so far, and I'm headed off to part 2 now!
Gary Kildall received the Milestone recognition from the IEEE for his work - that included creating a system to inform the OS about the hardware the computer has. We call it BIOS.
Still i wonder what could have been if Garys life wasnt cut so short. His opportunity would have certainly come to claim the throne. I imagine a chance to really stick the knife back at Billy would have been in the cards too.
RIP Gary, youll never be forgotten!
No.
He missed his chances, which had been handed to him on the proverbial silver platter, when he blew off IBM. And that mistake is 100% on Gary and his wife. Their own arrogance cost them the literal world, and from there the only way for Gary to go was down.
@@looneyburgmusic Big Blue would want you to believe they were blown off by Gary. Reality is, they were well aware what they were doing and it was all strategic fuckery if you ask me.
@@AllboroLCD no, it wasn't.
It was how they did business.
That's the other bit the Gary Cheerleaders always forget to mention - back in that era, even us kids who were involved in the world of computers knew what IBM was, and how they operated.
Back then, IBM was Apple + Google + Microsoft of today, all rolled into one.
Just not as nice
@@AllboroLCD Gary might have been an amazing programmer, (and he was), but a "visionary" he was not.
In his dealings with IBM he made the fatal mistake of sticking with the "old" way of thinking about computers, and thinking that IBM was just another potential CP/M customer, instead of THE company that would start a computer revolution...
Best and most comprehensive production about Gary to date!
Ending the first part before it gets interesting. Brilliant!
Either that or just evil of me! You can check out parts 2 and 3 now!
Excellent work on a brilliant man. We had quite a large CPM enclave here in Australia, so I started on the CPM side before DOS came along.
The original Spectravideo machines came with both CPM from Digital Research and SVI Disk Basic, created in cooperation with Microsoft, which itself then became part of MSX Disk Basic along with MSX-DOS the 8-bit version of MS-DOS.
Networking to the PC industry out of the main frame model but was still a business oriented device throughout the eighties and nineties. The PC was never supposed to take off, heck Bill Gates proclaimed that 240k of RAM would be more than sufficient memory to build a microprocessing platform around. I purchased a Tandy Clone in the mid eighties for north of $2k, suffice it to say that few people I knew had these devices. The world wide web is what has made the computer ubiquitous and in the early days of Microsoft and pre Google, this internet was not on anyones radar. Bill Gates never thought the PC would go beyond the realm of the few pencil neck geeks that were thrilled to program punch cards to make printouts of Snoopy.
Another fantastic video and this series is going to be great, based on this first part being excellent. Thank you for doing this and I look forward to the next part.
Glad you enjoyed it! The next part is out already and part 3 is out tomorrow
you should not compare a nice guy with a criminal
Hi ... Great video, but the 1620 was not a mechanical computer. It was an electronic variable-word decimal computer that used core memory.
Thanks for the info!
The music is distracting and too loud. It keeps crescendoing at odd moments.
why do people think it's always necessary?
@@w.alan.21 It is necessary. But it has to be well balanced, i.e. when there is no narration or dialogue, the music volume increases, when there's dialogue again, music goes down. It's a simple concept but it's not so easy to execute it correctly.
Thanks a lot for this interesting content.
(and thanks for fixing the audio)
We need to fight for this guy's legacy. As compared to him Bill Gates is just a silly joke.
Unlike Gates, Gary had a wonderful personality.
He was Tesla of the computer world. Wanted to give to people, a noble soul, a total opposite to his greedy profit driven rival, who wants to depopulate the world.
What a great series. Had heard parts of this history but never seen it so well summarised and complete. Thanks!
So glad you enjoyed it! Thank you so much for your kind super thanks! Totally unexpected but I accept these as verification that I'm doing work that entertains others in the right way. ☺️. It took over 5 months for me to make this docu-series and I'm glad it's going down well !
Gary was quite a guy. With his CP/M and the, (not so well known) MP/M (multi-user system.) I got to be one of the first to use it with dBASE!
He was located in Monterrey, CA next to KSBW TV.
The IBM 1620 was a transistorized digital computer, not mechanical.
It used BCD arithmetic rather than binary.
I remember seeing the price list for the original IBM PC, CPM was listed, due to an agreement compensating for Microsoft conflict with CPM copyright) the CPM price was more than twice the more buggy Windows price. Apparently the agreement just required it to be offered, the price may not have been specified.
Windows didn't exist when the PC was released, so no, you didn't see a price for "the more buggy windows" kid
A fantastic video, really high quality, learnt a lot
Kildall was such an important figure during the early history of PCs. He was smarter than Gates (and Gates was very smart) but he wasn't a shark. Urge everyone to read/listen to Fire in the Valley
I was able to break the BASIC used on our school's CP/M machine using simple file I/O operations, all I had to do was open a file on floppy, access it, close the file, and repeat. It didn't take long - just several times - and it would (IIRC) hard lock the machine. The teacher didn't believe me and insisted I'd done something wrong, until he proof read my code, and I proved it with a simple stripped down program. I was forced to move my project to a BBC Micro and adjust the I/O code using nothing more than the paper manual it shipped with, as we didn't have a disk drive for the BBC yet - and when a drive eventually arrived, it worked properly first time :-)
This is a real Legend! Sir Kildall
IBM wanted Gary's wife to sign an NDA before they would even tell her why they were in the office asking for a meeting. Gary was flying back from another meeting and since this was all before cell phones, never mind cell phone calling airplanes, she wouldn't sign so IBM left and went back to Bill and enquired about an OS not just the original plan for programming languages from MSFT
technical term for this debacle is "screwed the pooch".
Watch part 2, you'll see exactly what happens from both sides of the argument!
"IBM wanted Gary's wife to sign an NDA..." - Because that was how IBM worked.
It was her own arrogance which led her to refuse. And Gary wasn't, "flying back from another meeting," he was just out flying.
Very interesting approach, CH videos tend to focus on Intel, Apple, MS.
I think the biggest mistake Gary made was his misconception about Microsoft in the early days -- thinking they just made programming langauges and Gary made OSes, and probably the idea that MS would "never" get into OSes. So he was gone when the IBM execs showed up and the meeting happened between his lawyer, his wife and the IBM people while Gary was traveling, and I think this was a huge mistake on his part (not the travel, but not delaying the meeting if he could, but rather having his lawyer go through with it without him there; not sure if he was on the phone during the meeting or not but as we all know, it didn't go as planned or as Gary probably hoped). But again, I think part of it comes back to his naive thinking that MS wasn't really a direct competitor (obviously, CP/M was designed out of convenience and not necessarily initially to be a mass marketed product to the public, but rather something Gary did for himself and others around him as he had a need for an OS).
Although likely CPM would have lost steam much like DOS did when the GUI era came around with the Xerox Alto, and thus Apple and Microsoft developing GUIs. So it ineveitably would have faded away, although it may have changed the dynamic of the OS market even today. I'm thinking MS would have probably still done an OS (DOS) but perhaps later.
Really enjoyed this thanks! I had heard about him via Computer Chronicles but never much else. Good background!
Glad you enjoyed it!
@17:52 is incorrect! CP/M did not use INT to make calls to the BIOS. It couldn't possibly do so. Software interrupts weren't available on the 8080 and Z-80 cpus that CP/M ran on. The INT instruction or software interrupt was introduced with the 8086. It was DOS that made use on INT21h and that specific INT was used by applications to make calls to DOS itself. DOS did make BIOS calls using INT but not INT21h.
Also later on in the video you state that the 8088 was a "cut down" version of the 8086. I guess that's debatable depending on how you define "cut down". However, the only real difference is that the 8088 has an external bus that's only physically 8 bits wide. That made the motherboard cheaper, not so much the CPU.
I think Tom Rollander was referring to cp/m-86 specifically when he mentioned int21, but that's what he said...
knowing people that met Bill Gates in the 70s / 80s, Bill Gates would have always been Bill Gates even if DR DOS was the default install for the IBM PC. MS Excel would have still been created and MS may have even created Windows earlier because you can argue due to the success of MS DOS, there was not the same impetus.
Ya Steven; it wasn't just inspired it was 95+% the same exact code, Seattle Computer had the CP/M source which Kidall was very bad at protecting. There was next to zero 16bit code in QDOS and basically ran as CP/M 80 in 8 bit mode. This was disclosed in a court case against Microsoft by CP/M maker Digital Research; and DR won; but they only got an award of about $95,000 because they couldn't demonstrate that the early DOS variants had lost DR that much revenue, and later versions were markedly different with many 16bit components for addressing etc, so they were unable to prove those versions were infringing. The fact Microsoft became the licensor for the IBM PC with the rip of product wasn't relevant to the court.
A couple of years ago, I followed signs to an estate sale in Seattle. It turned out it was for Gary Kildall's mother, and was being run by his sister. We had some interesting conversation. She gave me a book from the sale - Bill Gates' 'The Road Ahead!'
Very interesting!!
Nolan (Atari) or Jack Tramiel were the best businessmen in the industry, if they hadn't been kicked out ot the companies they started they would have done more than the already had. One made the home gaming revolution/cheap computer technology in the home a fact, the other pushed that to breaking point and owned the company that produced the low low priced 6502 CPU....which was the PS5 AMD APU of it's day.
Kildall is no Bill Gates. And could never have outdone what Gates did. It takes more than being a good engineer to come out on top in the micro software business.
Yeah, because what's most important is to be a god-damn thief, scammer and con man. That's all Bill Gates ever was, is, and always will be!
Presumably one of the most gifted computer programmers in the early days of computing. Yet Gary failed miserably in terms of good luck and fortune. I guess that’s life 😮
Not necessarily good luck I would say, but just poor decision making when it came to the IBM deal and his perception of where Digital Research and MS stood in terms of product offerings and him not seeing MS as a competitor even though they were in different markets.
I sometimes wonder if people who make videos like this do any research at all. I wrote software for CP/M. There is no interrupt 21h on an 8080 processor and that therefore could not have been the way in which the operating system was called. You called address 0005 after loading C with a number indicating the function required. Later versions which ran on an 8086 used int 0E0h for OS calls.
If you listen to the programmer himself, Tom Rollander, he mentions specifically int21. I spent months doing research as you will see from all the sources cited on part 3s end credits.
@@AlsGeekLabThen there are two alternatives: Either he has forgotten or you misinterpreted what he said.
The 8080 processor does not have an INT 21h instruction. The closest instructions to this on the 8080 are the RST 0 through 8 instructions, but they were mostly intended for use by hardware interrupts and they were not used by CP/M. With CP/M you used CALL 0005 to call the operating system. You can confirm this by looking up the 8080 instruction set and the CP/M reference manuals yourself.
I have not misremembered this. I have in front of me original printed paper copies of both the CP/M User Manual from 1978 and an MP/M-86 OS Programmer's Guide from 1981. The former clearly documents a call to 0005h as being the entry point to BDOS for 8080 CP/M while the later clearly documents int 0E0h as being used as the entry point for 8086 versions of the OS.
Look it up yourself.
@@DavidHembrow I agree with you. I was also caught off gaurd by the mention of INT 21h. I have restored and built a few s100 computers that I still own. I am pretty familiar with how cp/m does it's thing on an 8080/z80, as well as programming for the 8080. Biggest givaway is there is no INT command for the 8080. I also have the asm source and full documentation for the Ithaca Intersystems DPS-1 CP/M BIOS. (Edit: Just confirmed in the manual to be sure. A system call is indeed a jump to BOOT+0005h. No INT21h. Isn't that an MS/DOS thing?)
Dude that don't review microcode for a video
If you look at the introduction of the ATARI ST on Computer Chronicles , you can see the biggest grin on his face because they used his OS which was better the Microsoft AND Mac OSs .
Cool video... why not do one about the real history of online video? It has come a long way since I pioneered it back in the mid 1990s.
Have you seen my video series "Back to the BBS?"
No.. does it include information about the history of online video? I never saw any video on the BBS 's back then@@AlsGeekLab
This was really well done 👏
Thank you very much!
Thanks for this video. When I was reading about him in the 90s, informations of him was so scarce.
Sounds like a founding father of personal computing, yet I'd never heard of him until now...
IBM could have saved society a lot of headaches if they had gone with Kildall instead of Gates.
WORKS IN BOTH EARS!!!!!!
The 1st time I got my hands on DR-DOS I was amazed! So far ahead of MS-DOS...
I did use DRDOS at times as it had better DIR function, doskey type command line history, and better memory managment. But inevitability found some compatibility problems, especially with games. MSDOS then brought these features in, so there wasnt a good reason to run DRDOS anymore.
Whilst ir may be a sliding door moment for Gary v Bill, it's the entrepreneurial talents and business strategies (and killer instinct) that allows Gates/Jobs and other "tycoons" to still win out. Gates probably would have just found the next innovation or market .
I was a big fan of DRDOS. I think that if it weren't for DRDOS, MSDOS would have stagnated at v3.1. DRDOS forced Microsoft to incorporate its useful features. In fact, Microsoft stole from small developers to quickly add features to be able to compete with DRDOS. There were several versions of MSDOS 6 due to lawsuits until they were able to develop their own versions of these features. In order to dissuade users from using DRDOS, Microsoft went so far as to program Windows 3.1 to detect DRDOS and refuse to run if it was detected, even though it was fully compatible!
@@knavekid I was working at Datalight with CEO Roy Sherrill in 92-94 Bothell and then in 94 Arlington Washington, they had a ROMDOS 3 that booted from floppy disk and we tested running Windows 3.1 on top of ROMDOS. We saw that same problem that prevented Windows 3.1 running on ROMDOS 3. From a note,article we changed our ROMDOS to run the same way as MSDOS and got Windows 3.1 to work. YES , Bill Gates, was trying to kill competition DRDOS 5 from running Windows 3.1 .
Really well done
Thank you!
Unfortunately, the very restaurant at which Gary Kildal got his fatal blow no longer exists today. It’s replaced by a British restaurant owned by a British couple since mid 2000s and frequented mainly by British and European tourists. I was surprised when I dared once to enquire some staff and the cashier about the incident. They told me they knew nothing about Gary Kildal or history of the previous restaurant that had occupied the same place.
I'm sorry to hear this, glad you asked them.
For years I thought Gary Kildall was just a computer journalist and had no idea he was the genius behind CP/M. His death was tragic, I'm sure the only reason he took to hanging around in dodgy bars was because he was shafted by his contemporaries.
Gary wasn't "shafted" by anyone but himself.
While he might have been a genius-level programmer, he had zero business sense, and that is why he lost his chance at working with IBM.
I’m loving this, Great Content! Thank you
Glad you enjoy it!
I read that description as overclocked genius.
There was a great tool on CP/M, called "sweep". Has anyone run across something similar for Linux or Windows? The specific feature I miss is copying files from one disk to another, sorted descending by size, and prompting for new media every time the target runs out of space.
And Gates thinks he is a geniius in medics also
5:48 The IBM 1620 was a second generation transistor based minicomputer, not a mechanical computer!
If Kildall was more of a businessman and less of a techie he might have gotten the IBM deal. OTOH, if he wasn't a such techie, Gates wouldn't have had anything to sell IBM in the first place.
He definitely would have put the loud music over this video
Got a question. Since you call the American made chip the "zed 80", do you refer to the Texas Rock band as "Zed Zed Top" or the rapper "Jay-Zed"?
Haha, I've never thought about that! I don't think I've ever talked about Jay-Z in my life, but I've probably talked about Zee-Zee top a fair few times, probably because I heard an American call them Zee-Zee. But I made Zed-80 in my head, as a British-English speaker, Z is Zed, so Zed 80 makes sense.. I'd never heard anyone American say Zee-80 before. But now you say it, it is an American invention, so I guess it should be called Zee-80!
@@AlsGeekLab I posted that mostly in jest. I've lived both in the States and the UK and I know I've said "zee" in the UK and "zed" in the US inadvertently. I grew up in the early 80's in the States so I guess that's why I say zee-80, but I lived in London for a few summers and had a friend there who had a zed-x Spectrum. We did have the same computer in the US but it was called the Timex Sinclair or something like that.
Great video, btw. I used to see Gary Kildall on Computer Chronicles back in the day and it was clear he had revolutionary ideas. Part of me wonders if he was just too nice of a guy. People like Bill Gates end up at the top of the pecking order because they elbow other people out of the way. I think even if Gary would have signed with IBM initially, Gates and Microsoft would have probably ended up developing MS-DOS from 86-DOS eventually (once they saw how much money Digital was making from CP/M-86). They would have found a way to make 86-DOS binary compatible with CP/M-86 (in much the same way Digital transformed their OS into DR-DOS making it compatible with MS-DOS).
@@sayyedal-afghani indeed, it would appear that the old adage " nice guys finish last" would appear to be true
History is littered with people that never got the credit (or income) for their creations. It's also littered with myopic types that bottleneck progress.
I think what really made Gates rich is Compaq computer in making a legal clone IBM compatible (and in many ways better) BIOS. Now Gates could sell MS-DOS as Microsoft retained ownership, but from an IBM standpoint this didn't matter because you could never legally use or license the IBM BIOS which it needed to run. So why own the rights if it can only be used in the IBM PC.
Funny how the people who want to create and supply mankind with gifts without taking advantage end up dead...
Thank you for this set of videos. It was a very in-depth review of what happened, both real and apocryphal. Very sad ending to the story. I think I would have gotten along well with Gary Kildall. During the early 90's, I wrote for PC Magazine and went to COMDEX where I met Bill Gates in '90 then in '91. If I had seen this, I may have thought differently about shaking his hand.
Glad you enjoyed it! If you can, I'd really appreciate it if you could share these videos on social media so others get to know the real story!
It's not what you know but who you know. Until we figure out what is really important in life we will get what we deserve.
thanks for adding actual captions for the Deaf
The System Of The Beast was built on the backs of good and gullible computer nerds everywhere.
How expensive would a 2nd Z80 be in the days? Using one for code and the other for screen by presenting each of them a shifted clock so one cpu is T1 and the other in say T2/T3? Or would that clash in the end? Bus logic and the 2nd cpu would propably kill the price
IBM was the 800 pound gorilla in computing. In terms of PCs, whoever was able to partner with IBM was going to dominate personal computing OS marketshare in the near term.
Don't insult Mr kildall. Gates is a shark. Kildall was a gentleman.
The same fonts are used in the contemporary, but futuristic movie Roller Ball
Although you add to the documentary I don't see any credit given to the documentary you use extensively: Triumph of the Nerds 1996 ‧ Documentary - you really should give credit to them for your video
There is credit throughout the video to the excerpts used for triumph of the nerds, both in the video itself, as well as in the description and in the credits at the end of the documentary in part 3. Every source was carefully attributed.
He missed the business oportunities others didn't. That was it, really
Nice video, well done ,thanks :)
Glad you liked it!
There's something I'm not getting it. Why to create the Z-80 Softcard if Gary already designed the BIOS and stuff? Wouldn't be easier (and cheaper) to compile CP/M for the MOS 6502 as he did for the Z-80?
Compatibility! Much of the software was written in assembly language ( 8080 or 6502 or 6809 Color Computer). Too hard to convert by hand from one 8080 computer system to a 6502 System) 32K, 48K, or 64 kilobytes for 8080 and 6502, memory just too small. Now these days with Great GNU C and CLANG compilers and many Gigabytes of dram. Easy to convert. Look at early history of Debian Linux 1992-94 and how they started creating a Linux distro in 1993 for the PC 80386 486 and 68000 cpus and grew to support many different target achitectures, sparc, mips, arm. 4 Megabytes of DRAM on a 68000 cpu in 1985 was huge.
The intel 8080 (or the generally compatible Z80) was the CPU that CP/M was made for. Converting it to a 6502 or other non-similar cpu (i.e. Motorola 68k or 6809) would have been a very time consuming task. Basically, you'd almost have to write it from scratch back in those days, which would have taken probably 6-12 'man' months minimum I'd reckon. Putting an (even then) relatively inexpensive daughter-cpu in the Apple II was a simple hardware upgrade.. kinda akin to putting the Apple II card in the Macintosh Performa was, many years later. Cheap, easy and generally, it just worked.
@@AlsGeekLab Maybe I overestimated what level of abstraction he accomplished with the BIOS. I though he was also abstracting from the CPU, not general I/O hardware (periferics) only. Didn't realize cross-compiling is newer than that era.
So if Gary had successfully bought fwd the computer revolution 10years - The Ai's would of already killed us all .
Maybe that's what killed Gary?!
Gary don't have the mindset to become billionaire and will not be like Bill Gates. While Bill Gates is thinking "if I can get $1 from every copy of MS-DOS from 1 billion IBM PC users. I will become a billionaire". Gary's thinking is "I must get $75 from each copy of DR-DOS for all the hard work that I have done". In the end, Bill Gates become billionaire and Gary didn't become billionaire .
If plm was made to work in the 8008 it's really sad stuff like the 8800 or the plethora of z80 PCs were stuck with just basic
Please note. An inventor does not always get the benefit of his creation. Check out who started McDonalds Hamburgers. Check out who really made the Model T. Check out how Edison stole the movie camera from French inventors.