Gary Kildall - The Man That Should Have Been Bill Gates - Part II STEREO RE-EDIT
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 พ.ค. 2024
- Part 2 of the 3 part documentary: Dive into the untold story of Gary Kildall, the overlooked genius who laid the foundation stones of the personal computing revolution with his groundbreaking CP/M operating system. In this eye-opening exposé, we unravel the momentous journey of a tech maestro who could have been in the limelight, akin to Bill Gates, but was tragically edged out by the fierce market strategies of Microsoft and IBM. Uncover the dramatic twists and the bitter rivalry that ensued as MS-DOS controversially eclipsed CP/M, bringing a sad and abrupt halt to Kildall's soaring career. Watch as we shed light on a saga brimming with innovation, rivalry, and heartbreak, echoing the turbulent early days of the software industry. Don't miss this deep dive into the life of a visionary who should have been etched in history as a titan of the tech world - Gary Kildall: the man who should have been Bill Gates.
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TOC
0:00 Introduction
14:59 Bill wouldn't cut my throat, right?
36:54 Coming up in part III
-- Sources used in this video are noted in the end credits of Part III --
-- Video clips used in this video series --
Scoble, Robert:
The Rest of the story: How Bill Gates beat Gary Kildall in OS war, Parts 1,2 and 3.
connectedsocialmedia.com/405/...
connectedsocialmedia.com/407/...
connectedsocialmedia.com/408/...
The Computer Chronicles:
Gary Kildall Special (1995):
• The Computer Chronicles - Gary Kildal...
Concurrent DOS (March 14th, 1985)
• Computer Chronicles - Concurrent DOS
Concurrent CP/M (inlcuding Intro to Gary Kildall):
• Computer Chronicles - Concurrent CP/M
Dagogo Altraide (Coldfusion):
The Man Who COULD Have Been Bill Gates [Gary Kildall]
• The Man Who COULD Have Been Bill Gate...
Computer History Museum
Legacy of Gary Kildall: The CP/M IEEE Milestone Dedication
• Legacy of Gary Kildall: The CP/M IEEE...
Clint Basinger / Lazy Game Reviews
LGR Tech Tales - How Digital Research Almost Ruled PCs
• LGR Tech Tales - How Digital Research...
Thinkonomics
How Bill Gates CRUSHED IBM with One GENIUS Move (The Story of the Personal Computer)
• How Bill Gates CRUSHED IBM with One G...
Paul Allen on Gates, Microsoft
CBS News
• Paul Allen on Gates, Microsoft
Studio64 Podcasts
Gary Kildall | CP/M OS
• Gary Kildall | CP/M OS | First PC Ope...
Retrobits
Let's Test CP/M and MS DOS on the Kaypro 4 Plus 88!
• Let’s test CP/M and MS DOS on the Kay...
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
I was an engineer in the aerospace industry watching the embryonic personal computer business evolve. You are relating the Gary Kildall context as I remember it, including the multitasking aspect. The treachery embedded here enraged me. To this day, I have refused to have an IBM or Intel product in my house.
That must have been tough to do, with the near monopoly Intel had on the computing industry from the mid 90s through until apple went to M1/ARM recently !
There was no treachery. The E/ite control the big corporations and they want their businesses at the top, not for a genuine little man makes it big story to happen. Kildall had no chance and he must've understood the game. He offered IBM an extraordinary good deal. $10 on an IBM PC was nothing for a superior product and I don't imagine gates' offer was much better. And the fuss they made about him not wanting to sell the rights was not a problem with Gates. Gates fronts a corporation that's really controlled by the E/ite. It was never going to be anybody else.
I've had a love hate relationship with MS since 1994. While I know the basic story, it's good to see the history as spoken by the people involved. That IBM salesman was hilarious!
To be clear, int 21h was on the x86 architecture. For the 8 bit 8080/Z80 version, the call to the BIOS was made by loading registers with particular values related to what you wanted to do (i/o, etc...) and then doing a jump to memory location 0005. When cloned into the x86 architecture, the same registers and values were used, but instead of jumping to a particular memory location, you did an interrupt 21h.
Incredible work and appreciate you showing both sides accounts. Want to note this is a life lesson for important meetings, never offer a partial group meeting when working Company to Company.
I'm not convinced DR or IBM could do a deal on this. IBM wanted a flat fee but DR was concerned about cannibalizing their existing customers. DR wanted to sell them MP/M which wasn't ready not 8086 CP/M which was what they wanted and was nearly ready. If you're IBM you'd be concerned about cannibalizing your existing mainframe and timesharing customers.
And QDOS is a clean API clone as far as I can tell. At least Paterson claims he did a clean room reverse engineering of the API. Also it runs on a different CPU, and has a different calling convention (int 21h vs RST or JMP 5). It also has a different filesystem QDOS uses FAT which was invented for MS's Standalone Disk Basic and CPM had its own file system. The API is based on what you'd need to get a 8080 CP/M program to run after you'd put it through SCP's TRANS86.
And, ironically, even though QDOS was designed to be device independent like CP/M the market settled on clones which are are completely binary compatible. E.g. you have a video display with a fixed layout at a fixed address (e.g. VGA 13h at segment A000h), UARTs have fixed register interfaces at fixed addresses (an 8250 compatible at 3f8h or 2f8h) and so on. Most MSDOS programs don't just use the Bios, they bypass it and write direct to the hardware.
Excellent comment! It really is the case that CP/M was specifically made to be able to adapt itself to the loose-to-no standards environment that existed in those early s100 personal computers. It was more about adapting to differnt architecture for connecting all the peripherals and how to talk to them... The CPU was the same, but where things were in the address space, and how to talk to each were the parts that needed abstraction. When IBM took over.. and the "IBM clone" became the dominate standard architecture, the need for the os to abstract away the addressing of everything faded. Of course, even these systems can be expanded custom, but the fact that there is always that expected architecture that needs to be emulated is an interesting move of the line of abstraction from the software and more toward the hardware.
@@maskddingo1779 Incidentally when CP/M reads sectors from disk it takes four Bios calls - SELDSK, SETTRK, SETSEC, SETDMA to select the disk, set the track, set the sector and set the DMA buffer address. In QDOS it's much more efficient because you have one call to the block device driver in IO.SYS. Paterson said he was pleased with this optimization. And on an IBM PC compatible that one call to the block device driver turns into one call to int 13h.
Also before the IBM PC clone market took off because you could buy compatible legal Bioses from companies like Phoenix there were some non PC compatible MS DOS machines. So they had their own firmware and hardware standards and a version of MSDOS with a custom IO.SYS.
You are right about this. I have read 2 books about this incident. DR is not going to accept a flat fee and Gary don't like the pushy attitude of the IBM executives. Beside this, the DR-DOS is also not yet ready for release and most likely the DR-DOS will not be ready to meet IBM schedule for the release of IBM PC. The IBM executives went back to Bill Gates and Bill Gates see an opportunity. Although Bill Gates don't have any Operating system on hand, he knew that Tim Paterson have already developed a DOS for 8086. Tim Paterson are frustrated by the delay of DR-DOS release and decided to create DOS himself. Bill Gates bought DOS from Tim Paterson and rebrand it as MS-DOS. When IBM PC become successful with MS-DOS, Gary did offer the DR-DOS to IBM again. IBM didn't pre-install the DR-DOS and just offer DR-DOS as alternative to MS-DOS.
The first one was the best Gary Kildale video to date on TH-cam! This, I’m sure, will be equally as good!
This is a good video. I saw it like a week ago. This is a reupload. I wonder what changed and why.,
It was re uploaded because some complained about the sound so I fixed up the little issues and re uploaded
Excellent job. I owned all of the said in this documentary, including Pdp8, Pet, Apple, Imsi, Altar, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Cannon PC, Dr Dos, Q-Dos, Compact PCM, SWTC Kit, Osborne, and I hard wired my own c4004, c8008. C8080, 8086, 8085, Z80. Love this. LIVED and loved Dr Doss from Digital Research, Monterey, the most. Thank you.
Glad that your enjoyed the series!
I remeber using CP/M in 8 bits for the Zilog Z80 in the late 80's and was the first time that I've used a more advanced language than the then standard BASIC: It was Pascal and it blew my mind ! (At least until I discovered C in the mid 90's !)
IBM wouldn't license an OS from Digital Research but licenced an OS Microsoft? doesn't that seem odd?
Mom was on the board... It was handed to him..
IBM didn't want the licensing agreement of Digital Research, which was DRI will have $10 royalty with each IBM PC sold. That is what IBM is trying to avoid, DRI on the mean while thought that the licensing agreement proposed by IBM would open up complaints with other OEMs that sign the royalty licensing agreement with DRI.
@@AshNonokPlays But they didn't do it with MS. That's the problem here. Stolen code, nepotism, and all around slanted business dealings. Gates wasn't a brilliant businessman; he was given this like AshNonokPlays said.
Just a friendly correction: At 28:39-28:42 you state that the prompt a CP/M user would see upon startup would be an A followed by a colon, or "A:". This is not the case. CP/M has always by default had the drive letter followed by the greater-than symbol, or "A>", which would be the drive letter followed by ">". Some CP/M variations would be the drive letter followed by the user number such as "A0>" which is drive, user# then ">". Another variation is 0A> (User#, drive#, then ">") but NEVER "A:". Even in your at 28:42 it shows QDOS (see the "Seattle Computer Products copyright message, not Digital Research's) as having the "A:" prompt, not CP/M.
I noticed that too. Big screw up there.
Brings back memories. I remember Popular Electronics and bought Linear Op Amps (RC4136 I believe) from Godbout Electronics, from the ads in the back of the magazine.
Thanks for this outstanding documentary.
So glad you enjoyed it!
Been waiting for this!! Great job, Al!
And one more thing, When Compact of Houston wrote their DOS, it worked right , I knew them from the PIE shop. Their local hangout. Love you guys. Pip is now called Python , just in case you didn't know, and a bit more powerful of a linker across platform's. 😊 😂
I was around and in the IT industry when IBM PC was introduced. And I know this story as you told it. Fact is Gates is a brilliant business guy and went on to became rather rich and who remembers Kildall? Such is life... The techies never win!
I think the only thing DR could of done, which would of been a massive gamble, would be to do what Netscape did i.e. Open Source CP/M and provide services. That said if we all could see into the future we would never make any mistakes.
I'm a fan of Gary Kildall but this leaves a lot out. You do provide a text-over noting that CP/M-86 was still in development when the 5150 was released but didn't mention in this video, or the previous one, that DRI announced it would ship in early '79. The reason Tim Paterson wrote QDOS was because SCP thought DRI was dragging their feet and, when SCP shipped it in '80, so did the rest of the CP/M community. MS and IBM were most definitely responsible for burning the path forward for DRI but DRI had already started the fire behind themselves.
Fantastic documentary!
All 3 episodes.
Tamas!!! Thank you so much!
The close captioning isn't even close to what those in the video are actually saying. WTF?
A lie gets half way round the world whilst the truth is still putting its boots on!
1:16 and numerous other places throughout the video - it's Rolander, not Rollander.
Thanks for creating this series on the topic.
Glad you enjoy it!
Are closed captions broken for anyone else? Timing seems way off in places.
Thank you very much.
You are welcome!
Kildall was saddled with two major shortcomings: (1) his ex wife as a business partner, and (2) his own lack of the ability to see the main chance -- the latter being Gates' strong suit.
3 shortcomings if you consider Gates' mother bullshitting him into a deal. Yeah, nepotism at its finest. Gary didn't have his mother running blocker, he had, you know, _talent._
What exactly does the paragraph at 15:31 mean? Looks like it's missing words or something.
Basically, John Opel (IBM chief at the time) was also on the same board as Bill Gates' wife at another organisation. It is rumoured that Mrs Gates sr went to John Opel and put in a word for her son and this was also a contributing factor to this "three man band" company getting a shot with IBM in 1980
Why does your "video clips used in this series" not include the extensive sections of "triumph of the nerds" that are used throughout?
Note that I credit the clips as soon as they are shown.
interesting stuff.
BTW it's a trivial matter to normalize the volume of the video clips to be all be the same average level.
The volume level on this is all over the place. It goes from whisper to pissing off the neighbors ever couple of minutes or so.
Unfortunately not for me. I'm deaf in one ear and I can't hear the issues. Also can't see them in the vu Meters, I set normalisation on the video in the editor, so it obviously didn't do its job, but the waveforms look fine to me, and the people that QA'd it said it was fine.
If IBM was not willing to pay royalties to Digital Research how come they ended up paying royalties to Microsoft? Am I missing something?
They didn't pay royalties to Microsoft. Bill Gates even says so in the video
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.
Most people didn't see that back in 1980 though. Including Kildall
@@AlsGeekLab; Bill Gates did. And that’s crucial in this entire story.
There were people I knew at the time who knew about the potential importance of IBM with PCs including a computer programmer I worked with as well as the department of an engineer I knew who worked on data base projects for the US Navy at the time.
Why didn't they simply reduce the price of CPM-86 to make it competitive to PC-DOS?
As mentioned, IBM resold CP/M, it was out of the hands of DRI. IBM set the price, not DRI.
@@AlsGeekLab DRI wasn't allowed to sell their own product?
When you bought an IBM PC, you had the choice of buying MS-DOS, uP system or CP/M directly from IBM. Just like today, if you buy a PC, it comes with Windows. 99.8% of the market doesn't then wipe windows off it and go out and buy another operating system. There were no alternatives other than buying from IBM until the clones started like Compaq in 1983 or so. And they didn't really take off until 85-86. So you were forced to go IBM at the start, and that 3-6 year period was enough for Microsoft to take the stranglehold and own the market. Only a few brands such as Siemens persevered with CPM-86 (as Tom Rollander states).
"Ideas from different places" sounds very suspicious there.
The world that might have been if DOS wasn't still saddling the PC market.
DOS has been dead and buried for years now.
Time to join the 21st Century
$240 CP/M vs $40 MS-DOS - Why not change the CP/M pricing to be more competitive? 34:48
IBM set the price, not DRI
@@AlsGeekLab Okay, thanks! I guess IBM either really wanted to get their money back or they didn't want people to buy CP/M.
@@vinhluu2154 yeah I think they had it in for DRI.
@@AlsGeekLab IBM had no obligation to price it competitively but I would have at least asked them to renegotiate. Maybe DRI did but got nowhere. It just seems outrageously priced to make business sense.
@@vinhluu2154 because DRI had threatened IBM with a lawsuit, as Tom Rollander says, IBM came back with a counter offer - they would allow the sale of cp/m after all, on the condition that they could no longer sue IBM. This was contractually binding. DRI agreed to this, but they never thought to ask what price IBM would sell at, nor when they would release it. IBM ended up releasing it 6 months after the PC, plus $200 more than MS-DOS. DRI wanted it price competitive with DOS.
I had heard earlier that Gary was flying and didn't come to the IBM meeting, so IBM left and they went to Microsoft and made a deal. Here came a lot of supplementary information, which, however, has now been filtered from the afterthoughts.
Once a snake, always a snake. - Ode to Bill Gates
Yep.
Bill Gates did what any BUSINESSMAN would have done.
Kildall, on the other hand, was not a businessman, but a computer programmer.
It's called "CAPITALISM", look it up sometime
@@looneyburgmusic It's always amazing to watch someone attempt to see where they're going when they have their lips firmly and permanently attached to a wealthy mans behind.
@@merlepatterson Hardly kissing anyone's ass, just telling it like it is - Gates was a businessman, Kildall was not. When it came to business Gates was always ruthless, while Gary was always focused on the technology
@@looneyburgmusic You apparently haven't read up on patent law. Kildall may not have been a businessman, but he surely had the patent for what was obviously his intellectual property. Just because one declares themselves a "Businessman" doesn't mean they are exempt from ethics and law or just because they "got away with it".
🫶
Dorothy and Gary's billion dollar mistake.
Just one comment about this video, as it is something we see often on TH-cam: Sections that are repeated-... I'm not a toddler watching teletubbies.. I don't need to see twice the same guy saying the same stuff... please stop this.
The so-called "look and feel" claim that has been used so many times should never be allowed - it's much like Ford claiming only they can make cars with 4 wheels because they did it "first".
Sometimes certain ways of doing things just make sense, and work best, and those sorts of ideas should not be "owned" by anyone
edit: Reportedly, (and this part is never mentioned for some reason), it was Kildall himself who set the $240 cost for CP/M, not IBM....
A Karen ruined her husbands fortune
Gary Kildall wasn't Bill Gates and could never have been like Bill Gates. Those two had very different personalities and visions for the software industry. Stop flogging a dead horse.
Too bad the guy was a bit of a contentious guy.
Gary was a programmer, not a businessman. And the 80's were when computers in general went from being the domain of programmers to being the domain of businessmen.