Alma mater University of Washington (BS, MS, PhD)^[1][2]

[...]

Spouse(s)

Dorothy McEwen Kildall

Karen Kildall

Children

Scott and Kristen^[3]

Gary Arlen Kildall (/ˈkɪldˌɔːl/; May 19, 1942 – July 11, 1994) was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur who created the CP/M operating system and founded Digital Research, Inc. (DRI). Kildall was one of the first people to see microprocessors as fully capable computers, rather than equipment controllers, and to organize a company around this concept.^[4] He also co-hosted the PBS TV show Computer Chronicles. Although his career in computing spanned more than two decades, he is mainly remembered in connection with his development of the CP/M operating system, an early multi-platform microcomputer OS that has many parallels to the later MS-DOS used on the IBM PC.

Early life

Gary Kildall was born and grew up in Seattle, Washington, where his family operated a seamanship school. His father, Joseph Kildall, was a captain of Norwegian heritage. His mother Emma was of half Swedish descent, as Gary's grandmother was born in Långbäck, Sweden, in Skellefteå Municipality, but emigrated to Canada at 23 years of age.^[5]

Gary attended the University of Washington (UW) hoping to become a mathematics teacher, but became increasingly interested in computer technology. After receiving his degree,^[1] he fulfilled a draft obligation to the United States Navy by teaching at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California.^[6] Being within an hour's drive of Silicon Valley, Kildall heard about the first commercially available microprocessor, the Intel 4004. He bought one of the processors and began writing experimental programs for it. To learn more about the processors, he worked at Intel as a consultant on his days off.

Kildall briefly returned to UW and finished his doctorate in computer science in 1972,^[2] then resumed teaching at NPS. He published a paper that introduced the theory of data-flow analysis used today in optimizing compilers^[7] (sometimes known as Kildall's method), and he continued to experiment with microcomputers and the emerging technology of floppy disks. Intel lent him systems using the 8008 and 8080 processors, and in 1973, he developed the first high-level programming language for microprocessors, called PL/M.^[6] For Intel he also wrote an 8080 instruction set simulator named INTERP/80. He created CP/M the same year to enable the 8080 to control a floppy drive, combining for the first time all the essential components of a computer at the microcomputer scale. He demonstrated CP/M to Intel, but Intel had little interest and chose to market PL/M instead.^[6]

Business career

CP/M

Kildall and his wife Dorothy established a company, originally called "Intergalactic Digital Research" (later renamed as Digital Research, Inc.), to market CP/M through advertisements in hobbyist magazines. Digital Research licensed CP/M for the IMSAI 8080, a popular clone of the Altair 8800. As more manufacturers licensed CP/M, it became a de facto standard and had to support an increasing number of hardware variations. In response, Kildall pioneered the concept of a BIOS, a set of simple programs stored in the computer hardware (ROM or EPROM chip) that enabled CP/M to run on different systems without modification.^[6]

CP/M's quick success took Kildall by surprise, and he was slow to update it for high density floppy disks and hard disk drives.^{[citation needed]} After hardware manufacturers talked about creating a rival operating system, Kildall started a rush project to develop CP/M 2.^[8] By 1981, at the peak of its popularity, CP/M ran on 3000 different computer models and DRI had US$5.4 million in yearly revenues.^[6]

IBM dealings

IBM, presided by John R. Opel, approached Digital Research in 1980, at Bill Gates' suggestion,^[9] to negotiate the purchase of a forthcoming version of CP/M called CP/M-86 for the IBM PC. Gary had left negotiations to his wife, Dorothy, as he usually did, while he and colleague and developer of MP/M operating system Tom Rolander used Gary's private airplane to deliver software to manufacturer Bill Godbout.^[4][10] Before the IBM representatives would explain the purpose of their visit, they insisted that Dorothy sign a non-disclosure agreement. On the advice of DRI attorney Gerry Davis, Dorothy refused to sign the agreement without Gary's approval. Gary returned in the afternoon and tried to move the discussion with IBM forward, but accounts disagree on whether he signed the non-disclosure agreement, as well as if he ever met with the IBM representatives.^[11]

Various reasons have been given for the two companies failing to reach an agreement. DRI, which had only a few products, might have been unwilling to sell its main product to IBM for a one-time payment rather than its usual royalty-based plan.^[12] Dorothy might have believed that the company could not deliver CP/M-86 on IBM's proposed schedule, as the company was busy developing an implementation of the PL/I programming language for Data General.^[13] Also possible, the IBM representatives might have been annoyed that DRI had spent hours on what they considered a routine formality.^[10] According to Kildall, the IBM representatives took the same flight to Florida that night that he and Dorothy took for their vacation, and they negotiated further on the flight, reaching a handshake agreement. IBM lead negotiator Jack Sams insisted that he never met Gary, and one IBM colleague has confirmed that Sams said so at the time. He accepted that someone else in his group might have been on the same flight, but noted that he flew back to Seattle to talk with Microsoft again.^[10]

Sams related the story to Gates, who had already agreed to provide a BASIC interpreter and several other programs for the PC. Gates' impression of the story was that Gary capriciously "went flying", as he would later tell reporters.^[14] Sams left Gates with the task of finding a usable operating system, and a few weeks later he proposed using the operating system 86-DOS—an independently developed operating system that implemented Kildall's CP/M API—from Seattle Computer Products (SCP). Paul Allen negotiated a licensing deal with SCP. Allen had 86-DOS adapted for IBM's hardware, and IBM shipped it as IBM PC DOS.^[11]

Kildall obtained a copy of PC DOS, examined it, and concluded that it infringed on CP/M. When he asked Gerry Davis what legal options were available, Davis told him that intellectual property law for software was not clear enough to sue.^[15] Instead Kildall only threatened IBM with legal action, and IBM responded with a proposal to offer CP/M-86 as an option for the PC in return for a release of liability.^[16] Kildall accepted, believing that IBM's new system (like its previous personal computers) would not be a significant commercial success.^[17] When the IBM PC was introduced, IBM sold its operating system as an unbundled option. One of the operating system options was PC DOS, priced at US$40. PC DOS was seen as a practically necessary option; most software titles required it and without it the IBM PC was limited to its built-in Cassette BASIC. CP/M-86 shipped a few months later six times more expensive at US$240, but sold poorly against DOS and enjoyed far less software support.^[4]

Later work

With the loss of the IBM deal, Gary and Dorothy found themselves under pressure to bring in more experienced management, and Gary's influence over the company waned. He worked in various experimental and research projects, such as a version of CP/M with multitasking (MP/M) and an implementation of the Logo programming language.^[6] He hoped that Logo, an educational dialect of LISP, would supplant BASIC in education, but it did not.^[18] After seeing a demonstration of the Apple Lisa, Kildall oversaw the creation of DRI's own graphical user interface, called GEM. Novell acquired DRI in 1991 in a deal that netted millions for Kildall.^[15]

Kildall resigned as CEO of Digital Research on 28 June 1985, but remained chairman of the board.^[19]

Kildall also pursued computing-related projects outside DRI. During the seven years from 1983 to 1990 he co-hosted a public television program on the side, called Computer Chronicles, that followed trends in personal computing.

In 1984 he started another company, Activenture, which adapted optical disc technology for computer use.^[20] In early 1985 it was renamed KnowledgeSet and released the first computer encyclopedia in June 1985, a CD-ROM version of Grolier's Academic American Encyclopedia^[11][20][13] named The Electronic Encyclopedia,^[21] later acquired by Banta Corporation.^[22] Kildall's final business venture, known as Prometheus Light and Sound (PLS) and based in Austin, Texas, developed a home PBX system^[6] that integrated land-line telephones with mobile phones.

Personal life

Kildall's colleagues recall him as creative, easygoing, and adventurous. In addition to flying, he loved sports cars, auto racing, and boating, and he had a lifelong love of the sea.^[4][6]

Although Kildall preferred to leave the IBM affair in the past and to be known for his work before and afterward, he continually faced comparisons between himself and Bill Gates, as well as fading memories of his contributions. A legend grew around the fateful IBM-DRI meeting, encouraged by Gates and various journalists,^{[citation needed]} suggesting that Kildall had irresponsibly taken the day off for a recreational flight, and he became tired of constantly having to refute that story.^[13] In later years, he had occasional private expressions of bitterness at being overshadowed by Microsoft.^[6]

Kildall was annoyed when the University of Washington asked him, as a distinguished graduate, to attend their computer science program anniversary in 1992, but gave the keynote speech to Gates, a dropout from Harvard. In response, he started writing his memoir, Computer Connections.^[15] The memoir,^[23][24][25] which he distributed only to a few friends, expressed his frustration that people did not seem to value elegance in software,^[18] and it said of Gates, "He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry." In an appendix he called DOS "plain and simple theft" because its first 26 system calls worked the same as CP/M's.^[26] He accused IBM of contriving the price difference between PC DOS and CP/M-86 in order to marginalize CP/M. The journalist Harold Evans used the memoir as a source for a chapter about Kildall in the 2004 book They Made America, concluding that Microsoft had robbed Kildall of his inventions.^[13] IBM veterans from the PC project disputed the book's description of events, and Microsoft described it as "one-sided and inaccurate".^[15] In August 2016, Kildall's family made the first part of his memoir available to the public.^[24][23][25]

Selling DRI to Novell had made Kildall a wealthy man, and he moved to the West Lake Hills suburb of Austin. His Austin house was a lakeside property, with stalls for several sports cars, and a video studio in the basement. Kildall owned and flew his own Learjet and had at least one boat on the lake. While in Austin he also participated in volunteer efforts to assist children with HIV/AIDS. He owned a mansion with a panoramic ocean view in Pebble Beach, California, near the headquarters of DRI.

Death

On July 8, 1994, Kildall fell at a Monterey, California, biker bar and hit his head.^[27] The exact circumstances of the injury remain unclear. He had been an alcoholic in his later years.^[15][28] Various sources have claimed he fell from a chair, fell down steps, or was assaulted, because he had walked into the Franklin Street Bar & Grill wearing Harley-Davidson leathers.^[12] He checked in and out of the hospital twice, and died three days later at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula. An autopsy the next day did not conclusively determine a cause of death.^[26][3] A CP/M Usenet FAQ says he was concussed from the fall and died of a heart attack; the connection between the two are unclear.^[29] He is buried in Evergreen Washelli Memorial Park in north Seattle.

Recognition

Following the announcement of Kildall's death, Bill Gates commented that he was "one of the original pioneers of the PC revolution" and "a very creative computer scientist who did excellent work. Although we were competitors, I always had tremendous respect for his contributions to the PC industry. His untimely death was very unfortunate and his work will be missed."^[4]

In March 1995, Kildall was posthumously honored by the Software Publishers Association (SPA) for his contributions to the microcomputer industry:^[30][31][6]

• The first programming language and first compiler specifically for microprocessors: PL/M. (1973)

• The first microprocessor disk operating system, which eventually sold a quarter of a million copies: CP/M. (1974)

• The first successful open system architecture by segregating system-specific hardware interfaces in a set of BIOS routines.^{[32][33][34][35]} (1975)

• Creation of the first diskette track buffering schemes, read-ahead algorithms, file directory caches, and RAM drive emulators.

• Introduction of operating systems with preemptive multitasking and windowing capabilities and menu-driven user interfaces (with Digital Research): MP/M, Concurrent CP/M, Concurrent DOS, DOS Plus, GEM.

• Introduction of a binary recompiler: XLT86. (1981)^[36]

• The first computer interface for video disks to allow automatic nonlinear playback, presaging today's interactive multimedia. (1984, with Activenture)

• The file system and data structures for the first consumer CD-ROM. (1985, with KnowledgeSet)

[...]

References

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b} Kildall, Gary Arlen (December 1968). Experiments in large-scale computer direct access storage manipulation (M.Sc. thesis). University of Washington. Thesis No. 17341.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b} Kildall, Gary Arlen (May 1972). Global expression optimization during compilation (Ph.D. dissertation). Seattle, Washington, USA: University of Washington, Computer Science Group. Thesis No. 20506, Technical Report No. 72-06-02.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b} Markoff, John Gregory (1994-07-13). "Gary Kildall, 52, Crucial Player In Computer Development, Dies". The New York Times. p. D19.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b c d e} "Special Edition: Gary Kildall". The Computer Chronicles. 1995. Archived from the original on 2014-07-02. Retrieved 2014-06-13.

• ^ Andersson, Ulrika (2009-01-19). "Skellefteåättling kunde ha varit Bill Gates". Norra Västerbotten (in Northern Sami). Archived from the original on 2009-05-24. Retrieved 2009-05-07.

• ^

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• ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Swaine, Michael (1997-04-01). "Gary Kildall and Collegial Entrepreneurship". Dr. Dobb's Journal. Archived from the original on 2007-01-24. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

• ^ Kildall, Gary Arlen (1973-10-01). "A Unified Approach to Global Program Optimization" (PDF). Proceedings of the 1st Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL). Boston, Massachusetts, USA: 194–206. doi:10.1145/512927.512945. hdl:10945/42162. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-06-29. Retrieved 2006-11-20. ([1])

• ^ Eubanks, Gordon. Akass, Clive (ed.). "Interview: Gordon Eubanks, Former Student & CEO of Oblix, Inc". Recollections of Gary Kildall (Interview). DigitalResearch.biz. Archived from the original on 2006-12-09. Retrieved 2006-11-30.

• ^ Isaacson, Walter (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Simon & Schuster. p. 358. ISBN 978-1476708690.

• ^

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• ^{a b c} Wallace, James; Erickson, Jim (1993). Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. New York: HarperBusiness. ISBN 0-88730-629-2. ISBN 978-0-88730-629-7.

• ^

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• ^{a b c} Freiberger, Paul; Swaine, Michael (2000) [1984]. Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer (2nd ed.). New York, N.Y., USA: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-135892-7. ISBN 978-0-07-135892-7.

• ^

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• ^{a b} Young, Jeffrey (1997-07-07). "Gary Kildall: The DOS That Wasn't". Forbes. Archived from the original on 2011-06-23. Retrieved 2011-08-29.

• ^

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• ^{a b c d} Evans, Harold; Buckland, Gail; Lefer, David (2004). They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 978-0-316-27766-2. ISBN 0-316-27766-5.

• ^ Manes, Stephen; Andrews, Paul (1992). Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry—and Made Himself the Richest Man in America. Doubleday. ISBN 0-671-88074-8. ISBN 978-0-671-88074-3.

• ^

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• ^{a b c d e} Hamm, Steve; Greene, Jay (2004-10-25). "The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates - A new book says Gates got the rewards due Gary Kildall. What's the real story?". BusinessWeek. Bloomberg Businessweek. Archived from the original on 2012-06-29. Retrieved 2006-11-13.

• ^ Eubanks, Gordon (2000-11-08). Morrow, Daniel S. (ed.). "Gordon Eubanks Oral History" (PDF). Computerworld Honors Program International Archives (Interview). Cupertino, CA, USA. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-03-26. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

• ^ Rolander, Tom (2007-08-08). Scoble, Robert (ed.). "Scoble Show". PodTech.net (Interview). Archived from the original on 2016-11-11. Retrieved 2016-11-11.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b} Rolander, Tom (1994-07-15). "In Memory of GARY A. KILDALL May 19, 1942 -- July 11, 1994". Tom Rolander's Website and Album (Memorial service). Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Calif., USA. Archived from the original on 2007-09-27. Retrieved 2006-11-30.

• ^ Burton, Kathleen (1985-07-29). "Cash-short Digital Research cuts staff, seeks investors". Computerworld - The Newsweekly for the Computer Community. Computer Industry. XIX (30). Monterey, California, USA: CW Communications, Inc. p. 72. ISSN 0010-4841. Archived from the original on 2020-02-17. Retrieved 2020-02-17.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b} Allan, Roy A. (2001). A History of the Personal Computer - The People and the Technology (ebook) (1 ed.). Allan Publishing. ISBN 0-9689108-3-1. ISBN 978-0-9689108-3-2. Retrieved 2016-11-18.

• ^ Stark, Craig L. (1986-04-29). "CD ROM Conference: Lured by 600 Megabytes on Disk". PC Magazine: 42. Retrieved 2016-11-19.

• ^ "Tom Rolander - Serial entrepreneur and Emergent Farming co-founder". Retrieved 2016-11-11.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b} Shustek, Len (2016-08-02). "In His Own Words: Gary Kildall". Remarkable People. Computer History Museum. Archived from the original on 2016-12-17. Retrieved 2016-11-17.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b} Perry, Tekla S. (2016-08-03). "CP/M Creator Gary Kildall's Memoirs Released as Free Download". IEEE Spectrum. Archived from the original on 2016-11-17. Retrieved 2016-11-17. Later chapters, they indicated, did "not reflect his true self," but rather his struggles with alcoholism, and will remain unpublished.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b} Kildall, Gary Arlen (2016-08-02) [1993]. Kildall, Scott; Kildall, Kristin (eds.). Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the Evolution of the Personal Computer Industry (Manuscript, part 1). Kildall Family. Archived from the original on 2016-11-17. Retrieved 2016-11-17.

• ^

• Jump up to:

• ^{a b} Andrews, Paul (1994-07-14). "A Career Spent in Gates' Shadow—Computer Pioneer Dies at 52". The Seattle Times. Archived from the original on 2017-10-13. Retrieved 2017-04-29.

• ^ Akass, Clive (2006-08-11). "The man who gave Bill Gates the world - Gary Kildall was one of the founding fathers of the PC but he is remembered now for his greatest mistake". Personal Computer World. Archived from the original on 2008-10-11.

• ^ Rivlin, Gary (1999). The Plot to Get Bill Gates. Crown Business. ISBN 978-0-8129-3006-1. ISBN 0-8129-3006-1.

• ^ Kirkpatrick, Don (1999-01-12). "comp.os.cpm Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)". Archived from the original on 2007-09-29. Retrieved 2006-11-20.

• ^ Wharton, John Harrison (1994-08-01). "Gary Kildall, industry pioneer, dead at 52: created first microcomputer languages, disk operating systems". Microprocessor Report. MicroDesign Resources Inc. (MDR). 8 (10). Archived from the original on 2016-11-18. Retrieved 2016-11-18.

• ^ "SPA Award to Dr. Gary A. Kildall: 1995 SPA Lifetime Achievement Award Winner". Software Publishers Association(SPA). 1995-03-13. Archived from the original on 2019-12-21. Retrieved 2019-12-21 – via www.digitalresearch.biz.

^ Kildall, Gary Arlen (June 1975), CP/M 1.1 or 1.2 BIOS and BDOS for Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, An excerpt of the BDOS.PLM file header in the PL/M source code of CP/M 1.1 or CP/M 1.2 for Lawrence Livermore Laboratories (LLL):
[…]

/* C P / M B A S I C I / O S Y S T E M (B I O S)

COPYRIGHT (C) GARY A. KILDALL

JUNE, 1975 */

[…]

/* B A S I C D I S K O P E R A T I N G S Y S T E M (B D O S)

COPYRIGHT (C) GARY A. KILDALL

JUNE, 1975 */

• […]

• ^ Kildall, Gary Arlen (January 1980). "The History of CP/M, The Evolution of an Industry: One Person's Viewpoint". Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia. 5 (1): 6–7. Archived from the original on 2016-11-24. Retrieved 2013-06-03. […] The first commercial licensing of CP/M took place in 1975 with contracts between Digital Systems and Omron of America for use in their intelligent terminal, and with Lawrence Livermore Laboratories where CP/M was used to monitor programs in the Octopus network. Little attention was paid to CP/M for about a year. In my spare time, I worked to improve overall facilities […] By this time, CP/M had been adapted for four different controllers. […] In 1976, Glenn Ewingapproached me with a problem: Imsai, Incorporated, for whom Glenn consulted, had shipped a large number of disk subsystems with a promise that an operating system would follow. I was somewhat reluctant to adapt CP/M to yet another controller, and thus the notion of a separated Basic I/O System (BIOS) evolved. In principle, the hardware dependent portions of CP/M were concentrated in the BIOS, thus allowing Glenn, or anyone else, to adapt CP/M to the Imsai equipment. Imsai was subsequently licensed to distribute CP/M version 1.3, which eventually evolved into an operating system called IMDOS. […]

• ^ Killian, A. Joseph "Joe" (2001). "Gary Kildall's CP/M: Some early CP/M history - 1976-1977". Thomas "Todd" Fischer, IMSAI. Archived from the original on 2012-12-29. Retrieved 2013-06-03. […] When we failed to produce an operating system in a timely manner, Glenn started talking with Gary about CPM […] It took several months of twisting Gary's arm to get Gary to port it to the 8080. The final success came when Glenn talked Gary into just separating the I/O from the rest of it, with Glenn promising to re-write the I/O module for the IMSAI 8080 (which he did). So CPM on the IMSAI was a joint effort between Glenn and Gary. […]

• ^ Fraley, Bob; Spicer, Dag (2007-01-26). "Oral History of Joseph Killian, Interviewed by: Bob Fraley, Edited by: Dag Spicer, Recorded: January 26, 2007, Mountain View, California, CHM Reference number: X3879.2007" (PDF). Computer History Museum. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-07-14. Retrieved 2013-06-03. Killian: "[…] Intel had hired him a few months earlier to write a control program monitor to run on their little demo system for 8008 and now 8080. […] Glenn knew this and he would be talking with Gary, and he started twisting Gary's arm. He said, "Hey Gary, why can't we run this in this IMSAI?" "The I/O's all different, won't run." But Glenn persists and finally makes a deal with Gary. He says, "Okay Gary, if you split out the I/O, I'll write the BIOS, basic I/O's system," and Glenn named it then. "We'll split it out separately. I'll write that part, as long as you can make a division in the program there." And he got Gary to do that and Glenn put those two pieces together and was running Gary's CP/M on an IMSAI. Glenn let us know that, and it wasn't too much later than Billwas down there making arrangements with Gary Kildall to license CP/M. […] Now that the BIOS is separated out, anybody could write a BIOS for their machine, if it was 8080-based, and run this, so he started selling that separately under the company Digital Research that he formed and did quite well."

• ^ Digital Research (1981). XLT86 - 8080 to 8086 Assembly Language Translator - User's Guide (PDF). Pacific Grove, California, USA: Digital Research, Inc. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2016-11-18. Retrieved 2016-11-18.

• ^ Sammon, John (2014-04-27). "Computer pioneer honored in Pacific Grove". The Monterey County Herald. Archived from the original on 2014-05-08.

Further reading

• Goldman Rohm, Wendy (1998-09-01). The Microsoft File - The Secret Case Against Bill Gates (1 ed.). IDG. ISBN 88-11-73868-7. [2]

• Laws, David (2014-02-26). "Gary Kildall and the 40th Anniversary of the Birth of the PC Operating System". Remarkable People. Computer History Museum. Archived from the original on 2016-11-19. Retrieved 2016-11-19.

• "IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing - CP/M - Microcomputer Operating System, 1974" (PDF). Computer History Museum. 2014-04-25. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-04-03. Retrieved 2019-04-03.

• Huitt, Robert; Eubanks, Gordon; Rolander, Thomas "Tom" Alan; Laws, David; Michel, Howard E.; Halla, Brian; Wharton, John Harrison; Berg, Brian; Su, Weilian; Kildall, Scott; Kampe, Bill (2014-04-25). Laws, David (ed.). "Legacy of Gary Kildall: The CP/M IEEE Milestone Dedication" (PDF) (video transscription). Pacific Grove, California, USA: Computer History Museum. CHM Reference number: X7170.2014. Retrieved 2020-01-19. [3][4]

• Libes, Sol (1995). "The Gary Kildall Legacy". Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey. Archived from the original on 2016-11-19.

• Kildall, Gary Arlen (2016-08-02) [1993]. Kildall, Scott; Kildall, Kristin (eds.). Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the Evolution of the Personal Computer Industry (Manuscript, part 1). Kildall Family. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2016-11-17. Retrieved 2016-11-17. (Part 2 not released due to family privacy reasons.)

• Ness, Stephen A. (2017-10-21) [2016, 2014]. "CP/M Source". Archived from the original on 2020-02-25. Retrieved 2020-02-25.

• "Gary Kildall Conference Room" Dedication Ceremony (PDF). Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). 2017-04-21. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-01-02. Retrieved 2020-02-25. (18 pages)

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Gary Kildall

• "Dr. Gary A. Kildall". MaxFrame Corporation.

• Maxframe website at the Wayback Machine (archived 2004-10-1

Gary A. Kildall was born in Seattle, Washington, on 19 May 1942. He attended the University of Washington in Seattle where he majored in mathematics. He received the degree of Bachelor of Science in June 1967.

He attended Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, and was commissioned in August 1967. He received a delay in reporting for active duty to pursue graduate study.

Remaining at the University of Washington, he did research in areas of computer science, including artificial intelligence, information retrieval, compiler design, and operating systems design. He received the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science in December 1968.

In January 1969 he reported for active duty at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, where he taught in the Department of Mathematics.

Upon release from active duty in January 1972 he returned to the University of Washington where he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in June 1972. His research in the area of compiler code optimization was under the direction of Professor Hellmut Golde [See Hellmut Paul Oscar Golde (born 1930) ] .

In March 1972 he joined the faculty of the Mathematics Department of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California.

He is presently teaching in the Computer Science Group. His current research is in micro-computer organization and applications.

He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

PUBLICATIONS OF G. A. KILDALL

OPEN LITERATURE

Books, published papers, notes, letters

1. 1ALGOL-E: An Experimental Approach to the Study of Progranming IP Languages with A. Roberts

   • 2nd Symposium on Education in Computer Science, Washington Univ., St. Louis, March 24, 1972

   • SIGCSE Bull., 4(1), 127-135 (1972}

2. A Unified Approach to Global Program Optimization IP

   • ACM Symposium on Principles of Prograrrrning Languages, Oct. 1973

   • Proc., 194-206 (l973)

Gary Kildall, a pioneering computer scientist who created the first popular operating system for personal computers, died on Monday at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, Calif. He was 52.

An autopsy performed yesterday failed to determine the cause of death, said John DiCarlo, Monterey County's deputy coroner.

While teaching computer science at the United States Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey in 1973, Mr. Kildall wrote a personal computer operating system, a fundamental program that controlled the way the central processing unit stored and retrieved information from a floppy disk drive. He named the program Control Program/Monitor, or CP/M.

Before his program was available, inexpensive hobbyist microcomputers were generally programmed with a punched paper tape reader or by laboriously entering information by setting combinations of on-off switches to encode each byte. Founding Digital Research

With his wife, Dorothy McEwen, Mr. Kildall founded a company to sell the CP/M operating system from their home in 1974. At first they called the company Intergalactic Digital Research, but the name was quickly shortened to Digital Research.

In 1977 Digital Research licensed CP/M to IMSAI, one of the early makers of personal computers. In the years afterward the program became the standard operating system for the first generation of 8-bit microcomputers.

Even before the invention of the electronic spreadsheet, these machines quickly became useful for business applications like word processing and relational databases, and by the early 1980's Digital Research's yearly revenues were $5 million.

Despite his business success, Mr. Kildall stayed on for several years as a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School because he enjoyed teaching. Meeting With I.B.M.

In one of the most controversial events in the history of personal computing, Mr. Kildall was approached by I.B.M. in 1980 to develop a 16-bit version of CP/M for its new personal computer.

There is a legend in the computer industry that Mr. Kildall ignored the I.B.M. representatives who had arrived for a meeting and went flying in his airplane instead. But Mr. Kildall has said that in fact he attended the meeting and left believing that he had struck a deal with I.B.M.

In any case, I.B.M. executives later met with a small software company, the Microsoft Corporation, then located in Bellevue, Wash., founded by William Gates to sell his version of the BASIC computer language. Upon learning that I.B.M. was designing a personal computer, Mr. Gates, who at the time did not sell an operating system, rushed to buy one from a small Seattle company.

Eventually I.B.M. offered both Digital Research's CP/M-16 and Microsoft's MS-DOS operating systems with the I.B.M. PC. But it priced its version of the Microsoft operating system, PC-DOS, at $40 and the Digital Resarch operating system at $240.

PC-DOS quickly became the standard operating system for the I.B.M. PC, and when Compaq produced the first I.B.M.-compatible personal computer, MS-DOS became the industry standard. Microsoft eventually became the leading supplier of all kinds of personal computer software, and eventually broke with I.B.M. in a dispute over MS-DOS's successor operating system, OS2.

Many people in the computer industry argued that Microsoft's MS-DOS infringed on CP/M patents, but Mr. Kildall decided not to sue.

"In those days everyone was imitating everyone else," he said in a magazine interview several years ago. "That's why I didn't do anything about CP/M; it never occurred to me."

Mr. Kildall was widely viewed as a creative innovator in software design who disliked the cut-throat aspects of business and avoided many of the more aggressive tactics employed by his competitors in the computer industry.

Thomas Rolander, who was director of engineering for Digital Research when the company was approached by I.B.M., said he had flown with Mr. Kildall on the day of the I.B.M. meeting. He said he and Mr. Kildall arrived late at the meeting and refused to sign a nondisclosure document from the computer maker after the I.B.M. executives refused to sign a similar document presented by Digital Research.

Mr. Rolander said that several months later I.B.M. returned with an offer that included a royalty, but that I.B.M. had made the decision to price the two competing programs differently.

Mr. Kildall remained involved as chairman of Digital Research until the company was sold to Novell in 1991. He founded a second company in 1985 called Knowledge-Set to develop one of the first consumer applications for CD-ROM, a disc-based version of the Grolier Encyclopedia.

More recently, he moved to Austin, Tex., to found Prometheus Light and Sound, which is developing a "home PBX system."

Several years ago, he moved back to the Monterey area, where he began working on a book titled Computer Connections, a history of the computer industry. Mr. Kildall self-published the book earlier this year.

Mr. Kildall was born in Seattle and received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington. He and Ms. McEwen were married in 1962 and divorced in 1983. He is also survived by two children, Scott, of San Francisco , and Kristin, of Seattle, and by his mother, Emma, and sister, Patricia Guberlet, both of Seattle.

Although a million CP/M computers have been sold, several million more run MS-DOS. How did the business of computing arrive at a standard?

It was n nice piece of business for Seattle Computer.Their project 10 write an operating system for the 8086 processor was under way anyway - they needed it for their own hardware. So getting some upfront money to finish the software. plus $10,000 for each customer Microsoft licensed it to, seemed like a great deal to Seattle Computer president Rob Brock.

Brock had his first glimmer of doubt about the wisdom of the deal one day late in 1980 when someone called Seattle Computer with a question.

"I'm with IBM." the voice said. ·•1 want 10 know something about the operating system you· re doing for us.·

"You're with WHO?" Brock asked, his voice rising incredulously. The man on the other end of the receiver said .. oops" and hung up.

When Brock mentioned the call to his employee Tim Paterson. who was writing the software to the specifications of Microsoft's customer, the 1wo laughed about it and wondered if that customer might really be Big Blue. It seemed odd and, even if the customer was IBM. not necessarily significant. The chance that TBM would be able to make much of a dent in the wide open world of microcomputers - far from the tightly controlled, large sale environment of IBM-seemed pretty small. No one company dominated the personal computer business, and it seemed unlikely that IBM would be more than just another player in a crowded field.

Who's the Boss?

The one thing that did dominate personal computing was the CPIM operating system. Nearly every microcomputer used it-even the Apple II. although it required an add-on board with a processor that ran the 8080 instruction set. It seemed unreasonable that even TBM would switch from an industry standard as strong as CP/M.

It was only when Paterson went to work for Microsoft a few months later that he learned it was TBM. But even a1 the introduction of the TBM PC in August 1981, it wasn't clear that the MS-DOS operating system Tim Paterson had written, dubbed PC-DOS by the press - although IBM called it simply DOS-would be important.

IBM introduced the PC with three operating systems-PC-DOS. the p-system and CP/M 86. Even the market research firm, Future Computing, wrote that the most significant aspect of the new machine was that the PC ran CP/M.

But CP/M was not to dominate the personal computing world any longer. and Future Computing quickly changed its tune. Later reports by the Texas-based market research firm rated a new computer largely on a single factor: whether it could run off-the-shelf PC-DOS applications.

Today. while laptop computers remain a stronghold for CP/M. the majority of the action in software development and microcomputer sales has been with MS/PC-DOS machines.

How did it happen? Why did CP/M lose out to MS-DOS? Why is CP/M still important in the world of microcomputers? And what's the difference anyway? ls MS-DOS any better than CP/M?

The best way to answer these questions is to go back to the beginning.

The Birth of CP/M

In 1972, while Gary Kildall was teaching computer science at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School 1n Monterey, Calif .• he became intrigued with one of the fin.I of a new type of semiconductor part called a microprocessor. Although the four-bit Intel 4004 was too limited 10 do anything useful. Kildall's curiosity was piqued by the idea of a computer on a chip, and he decided 10 visit the Silicon Valley company that was making the things and see what else Intel had cooking.

Kildall and the small group of engineers working on microprocessors at Intel hit it off, and soon Kildall found himself commuting inland from his ocean-side home one day u week to work at Intel. Using a minicomputer 10 simulate Intel's new eight-bit microprocessor, the 8008, Kildall soon had created a version of the PL-I language that ran on it.

Kildall took one of the systems Intel sold as :in aid in developing software for the new microprocessors as partial payment for his work. Although his students at the Institute loved to play with the 8008-based microcomputer (which was soon upgraded with the more powerful 8080 and a high-speed tape reader), Kildall knew it needed real data storage if it was going 10 be truly useful. He did some work for Shugart Associates in 1972 in exchange for one of the early eight-inch floppy disk drives. But Kildall, no hardware ex:expert. failed in designing a controller board to interface the drive with his computer.

It was not until 1973, with John Torode from the University of Washington designing the hardware, that Kildall was able to write a simple operating system to control the transfer of d11a between the computer and the disk drive.

Despite the acronym DOS, which stands for Disk Operating System, there is more 10 such software than the kernel that Kildall had written to control the disk drive. However, Kildall wasn't focusing his attention on fleshing out his operating system kernel. The project he had grcnt hopes for was a microprocessor-based horoscope machine that he and a friend built and installed in Mores nil around San Francisco. Although the work didn't pay off in the anticipated deluge of quarters - the mechanical pan of the machine tended to jmn after ii had printed juM n few horoscopes- it rounded out Kildall's kernel.

When he tacked the software development tools (an editor. assembler and debugger that aided the production of language the microprocessor understood) he had used to develop the horoscope program onto his kernel, Kildall had all the tools needed 10 write and run useful programs.

When Kildall showed his Control Program/ Monitor (CP/M for short) 10 the powers that were at Intel. they said it had no commercial potential. The company thought its microprocessors would end up largely in watches, calculators and appliances. not in the kind of general-purpose microcomputers hobbyists were building.

Thus it was that Kildall, encouraged by his wife Dorothy, formed a company called Intergalactic Digital Research. placed ads in a few magazines and began to sell his CP/M. As the business became more serious, the Kildalls incorporated as Digital Research. Inc. (DR!). Dorothy. to avoid any · 'just his wife·· stigma, began using her maiden name, McEwen. When they sold IMSAI unlimited rights to CP/M for $25,000 in 1977, Digital Research became a full-time enterprise with Gary running research and development and Dorothy hand I ing the business side.

When the ability to utilize a disk drive and i1s Z80 microprocessor (which was faster than the 8080 bu1 ran the same instruction set) gave IMSAI an edge over i1s chief competition. MITS (maker of 1he first commercially successful personal computer. I.he Altair), other emerging microcomputer companies began to make the trek to Digital Research in Pacific Grove, a suburb of Monterey.

Tarbell Electronics. Digital Microsystems, Heath Electronics and the dozens of other companies that licensed the CP/M operating sys1em had good reasons for 1he 1rip. fl was cheaper to license the operating system Kildall hod developed and 1ailor i110 o particular Z80-based microcomputer than it was 10 develop an opera1ing sys1em from scratch. More important. a machine on which CP/M ran could run I.he application programs 1hat had been written for other CP/M machines. The only operating systems in competition with CP/M were limited to a single manufacturer's machine. and so CP/M and the Z80 microprocessor on which it ran became a kind of standard by default.

Not all computer manufacturers offered CP/M. Radio Shack substituted its proprietary TRS-DOS for I.he Z80-based TRS-80 computers, for example. Bu1 many TRS-80 users bought a version ofCP/M tailored for I.he Radio Shack machines by other companies. such as Pickles and Trout, in order to run all the CP/M software.

The most popular personal computer in 1980 was unquestionably the Apple II, which couldn't run CP/M because it was based on the 6502 instead of the 8080 or Z80. Although much credit for the success of Apple's machine has to be given to the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc (which at first ran only on I.he Apple II under Apple's proprietary DOS). many Apple II owners bought an add-on card for their machines 1ha1 included a 2-80 processor. memory and 1he CP/M operating sys1cm. This allowed I.hem 10 run 1he e,·er-increasing pool of business software being written for ORI's operating sys1en1, including WordMar and dBASE U.

The most popular of such cards was the Softcard, developed and sold by Microsoft. In fact. sales of the Softcard were so high that Microsoft became DRI's largest cus- 101nerf or CP/M. As I9 80 rolled 10a n end. 1h:11fa c1w as soon to take on an ironic twist.

CP/M Upgraded

When IBM decided 10 en1er the microcomputer business. it went to Microsoft on one-day'i. no1icc-for advice on wha1 kind of machine to build and for several key pieces of software. Ga1es had to cancel an appointment with Atari's chairman Ray Kassar in order to meet with mM. but he did it on 1he theory that if IBM was entering the microcomputer business as rumored, Microsoft should do anything it could to be a pan of it- because IBM succeeded at nearly everything it tried.

Microsoft's BASIC interpreter had been an integral pan of nearly every personal computer sold, and Microsoft's other languages were popular among software developers. Microsoft president Bill Gates knew microcomputers and the personal computer market as well as anyone. Thus it was no surprise when IBM asked Microsoft to make a proposal about developing languages for its planned machine and detail what the features of that machine should be.

No, it was no surprise that 1he computing industry veterans listened to president Bill Gates extol the new generation of 16-bit chips and the need for a disk drive- they were thinking of an 8-bit machine with a cassette interface. But it was a bit of a surprise when an mM official responded by asking Gates to sell IBM CP/M as well. Ga1es patiently explained that CP/M belonged to a company 1,000 miles down I.he coast. ORI, headed by Gary Kildall. Ga1es dialed DRI's number and handed I.he phone 10 an IBM representative, who made an appointment for the next day.

Legend has it that Kildall was out on a joyride in his plane when IBM came calling. Actually, Kildall already had an appointment with a customer in Silicon Valley the next day and, unlike Gates. decided to keep it. Af1er all, Dorothy McEwan always handled I.he business end of things with the firm's legal counsel anyway-why should a meeting with IBM be any different?

After concluding his business. Kildall flew back in the late afternoon and joined the meeting in progress, but things weren't going well. McEwan and DRJ's legal counsel Jerry Davis had balked at the nondisclosure agreement TBM had asked them 10 sign, because i1 contained a clause th:11 specified any infom1ation revealed in I.he meeting would become IBM's 10 use as it pleased. Since 1he meeting was about CP/M, McEwan thought such an agreement amounted to giving away the store, and refused 10 sign. The ll3M representatives were on I.he verge of leaving when Kildall arrived.

Kildall, familiar with IBM's way of doing things, knew IBM was an honorable company. The nondisclosure document ,vas meant to protect TBM from lawsuits in the even1 it later marketed similar technology that had been developed independently within IBM . With Kildall's reassurances. the nondisclosure agreement was signed. the meeting proceeded and. according 10 Kildall. went rather well.

Gary and Dorothy, as it happened, were about 10 leave on vacation and had seats on the flight that took the IBM representatives back to Boca Raton, Fla. Discussion continued amiably during the flight, according to Gary, and they agreed 10 get back together after the Kildalls returned from vacation .

It never happened . Bill Gates has said the problem was Kildall' s expression of reluctance to modify CP/M for IBM's requirements; Kildall believed a standard was a standard. lo any case, IBM eventually came back 10 Microsoft and asked if the Bellevue. Wash., firm could do an operating system. as well as the languages. It added only another 10 percent or so 10 the amount of code Microsoft was to write for the new machine; more important. Microsoft knew the operating system under development at Seattle Computer nearly fit the bill . When Microsoft had described that operating sys• tern in writing and IBM agreed it would be fine, provided a few changes were made. Microsoft negotiated rights to Seattle Computer's 8086 DOS.

What Microsoft had really contracted for was the work of a person it knew quite well. Seattle Computer's Tim Paterson had taken the first couple of cracks at designing Microsoft's Z80 Softcard card for the Apple before another engineer finished up. Microsoft was also familiar "'uh Paterson· s latest product. a processor board for scientific and engineering computer s based on the new 16-bit 8086 chip from Intel: Microsoft had used the board while writing its new BASIC for the 8086 and its compatible cousin. the 8088 . The board "''as one of the first implementations of Intel's new chip . It was done so early that the documentation from which Paterson began designing in June was dated Jul y. and talked about five and eight MH z chips when only four MHz chips were available.

The operating system Paterson was writing for his newbboard was to be CP/M compatible so that CP/M programs for the eight-bit Z80 could sim- ply be tranSlated and run unchanged on the new 16- bit 8086 . Paterson had no access to CP/M other than its documentation. however. and used as his chief model the CP ~I look-alike operating system called COOS that ran on the Cromemco [mis-spelled in the article as "Cromenco"] machine they used at Seattle Computing .

Thus it was that some of the improvements of Paterson's DOS over CP/M were accidental. If CP/M encountered an open disk drive door when it was trying to read from a disk. for example. it would crash . Paterson's operating system. like the CP/M look-alike he used as a model. responded to an open door with an "Abort. retry or ignore?" message.

Some improvements were Paterson's idea. however. You could halt a program that was ruMing under CP/~I (and COOS ) only by rebooting the machine . Paterson decided the ability to "break" the operation of a program and return 10 the operating system prompt made more sense . He also thought that the need for the PlP utility program to be on the disk v. hen you wanted to copy a file made no sense; nor did the terms PrP and · · =' · 10 describe the action of copying a file. Thus he decided to embed a file copying command with more sensible syntax right into his operating system. And whereas CP/M could destroy files if a user switched disks without telling CP/M such a switch had been made, Paterson made MS· DOS look at the disk in the drive before it v.·rote 10 it 10 prevent such disasters.

Perhaps the key thing Paterson tried 10 do was 10 speed up read and write operations. Borrowing from the compiled BASJC , he had helped Microsoft put on his 8086 board, he made his operating system keep information about files-called FA Ts (File Attribute Tables)-io memory instead of on the disk, which speeded file operations considerably.

It turned out that Paterson's DOS was not perfectly compatible with CP/M. however. because - at least according to Paterson some of the features he copied from CP/ M"s documentation did not work exactly as documented.

The key difference between the operating systems, however. was due to differences between the chips for which they were written. The Z80 processor that CP/M was designed for could address only 64K bytes of memory. while the 8088 and 8086 processors Pater son wrote his DOS for could address one Megabyte ( I.OOOK bytes) of memory. IBM. through Microsoft. told Paterson to use only 640K bytes or that memo ry and reserve the remaining 360K bytes for the system's use. Even so. it was hard 10 imagine that programmers would ever need more than a 10-fold increase in memory. It augered much-improved programs for the next generation of personal computers.

This key improvement of Paterson's DOS over CP/M was also a feature of Digital Research's CP/M-86. of course . since it also ran on the more advanced chips. So why did MS-DOS win?

IBM Picks the Winner

CP/ M-86 was only a plan on a blackboard on that fateful day in 1980 when IBM called on DRJ. Unfortunately. IBM never called back. and Kildall was unaware of the project's process until, shortly before the IBM PC was to be introduced in August of 1981. IBM returned and asked him 10 write an operating system for its new machine. Since demand for the Z80-based CP/M had not abated. not much work had been done yet on CP/t,.1 for the 8086: a team immediately got to work.

In retrospect. it is clear IBM wanted CP/M only as a backup in case its new operating system did not gain support among third party developers. IBM had clearly stacked the cards in its DOS's favor. The price of PC-DOS was $40 compared to $250 for CP/M-86. Moreover. DRI was unable to ship CP/M-86 for a full year after the PC's introduction. whereas PC-DOS was not only ready on the day of introduction. the programs mM sold for the machine ran on it. CP/M-86 never overcame Dos's head-start.

As it turned out. the need for MS-DOS 10 have CP/M compatibility was not significant. Rather than translate old programs that ran in 64K. most developers wrote new software that took advantage of the increased addressing space of the new IBM machine's operating system. Without it. the power and ease of use of such programs as Lotus 1-2-3. dBASE III and MultiMate would not have been possible. Without that extra addressing space. the IBM PC could not have been the overwhelming success it was.

The Best OS for Picos

For pico machines. however, such power is not always necessary . If a machine's intended tasks are note taking. simple communication via modem. limited number crunching and simple custom applications. the extra expense of more memory and a more powerful processor may not be jus tified. For many laptop machines, CP/M and a ZSO is just the ticket .

On the other hand. if compatibility with all the software one uses in the personal computer back at the office is called for, MS-DOS and the 8088 is the operating system of choice.

MS-DOS bas continued 10 improve. but many of the improvements are of limited value for today's picos. Versions 2.0 and higher of MS-DOS incorporate a hierarchical file structure that facilitates keeping things straight on a large capacity disk, a need that's less than dire on today's laptop machines, since the power draw and bulk of large capacity bard disks is currently more than can be handled .

Yet, there can be no doubt that MS-DOS has eclipsed CP/M. Although a million CP/M computers have been sold. several million more run MS-DOS. In the world of operating-system specific magazines, it is CPIM Users Guide versus PC. PC World, PC Tech Journal, and PC Week. In tile world of software publishing. tile odds are even higher in favor of MS-DOS. And if you need further proof , look no further than 10 Digital Research ·s latest operating system, Concurrent DOS: it is MS-DOS compatible. The tables have been turned.

Late one afternoon in the fall of 1974, in the sleepy California seaside town of Pacific Grove, programmer Gary Kildall and electronic engineer John Torode “retired for the evening to take on the simpler task of emptying a jug of not-so-good red wine … and speculating on the future of our new software tool”. [1] By successfully booting a computer from a floppy disk drive, they had just given birth to an operating system that, together with the microprocessor and the disk drive, would provide one of the three fundamental building blocks of the personal computer revolution. While they knew it was important, neither realized the extraordinary impact it would have on their lives and times.

EARLY DAYS

Gary Arlen Kildall was born to a family of Scandinavian descent in Seattle, Washington in 1942. His inventive skills flourished in repairing automobiles and having fun, but suffered in scholastic pursuits. He qualified for admission to the University of Washington based on his teaching experience at the family owned Kildall Nautical School rather than his high school grades.

In 1963, Kildall entered college and married his high school sweetheart Dorothy McEwen, who supported him in his studies. He was one of 20 students accepted into the university’s first master’s program in computer science. Here his mathematical talents were applied to a subject that fascinated him, all-night sessions programming a new Burroughs B5500 computer. To avoid the uncertainty of the draft at the height of the Vietnam War, on graduating with a PhD he entered a U. S. Navy officer training school and was posted to serve as an instructor in computer science at the Navy Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California.

CONSULTANT TO INTEL

Kildall remained at NPS as an associate professor after his tour of duty ended in 1972. He became fascinated with Intel Corporation’s recently introduced 4004 microprocessor chip and simulated its operation on the school’s IBM mainframe computer. This work earned a consulting relationship with Intel where Hank Smith of the Microcomputer Systems Group commissioned the development of PL/M, a high-level Programming Language for Microcomputers that served the company for decades.

To enable software development for Intel’s second generation 8-bit device, the 8080, Kildall needed to connect the chip directly to a new 8” floppy disk-drive storage unit from Memorex. Using PL/M, he wrote the prototype code for his Control Program for Microcomputers (CP/M) in a few weeks. (It was later tuned and rewritten in 8080 assembly language.) His own efforts to build the complex electronic circuitry required to physically transfer the data failed and the project languished for a year. Frustrated, he called John Torode, a college friend then teaching at U.C. Berkeley, who crafted a “beautiful rat’s nest of wirewraps, boards and cables” for the task.

“ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING DAYS OF MY LIFE”

Working in the tool shed behind his home in Pacific Grove, Kildall “loaded my CP/M program from paper tape to the diskette and ‘booted’ CP/M from the diskette, and up came the prompt: *. This may have been one of the most exciting days of my life, except, of course, when I visited Niagara Falls,” [2] he exclaimed, “We now had the power of an IBM S/370 [mainframe computer] at our fingertips.” [1] This is going to be a “big thing” they told each other. There is no record of the precise date of this event, but Torode recalls that it was before he moved to Chicago in the fall of 1974. [3]

As Intel expressed no interest in CP/M, Kildall was free to exploit the program on his own. Torode refined the “rat’s nest” and produced a complete floppy disk controller system. The first commercial licensing of CP/M took place in 1975 with contracts between Torode’s company, Digital Systems, and Omron of America. Kildall continued teaching part time at NPS and in 1976, with his wife Dorothy as co-founder, they established a company called Intergalactic Digital Research. They shortened the name to Digital Research Inc. (DRI) after a couple of years.

Glenn Ewing, a former NPS student, approached DRI with the opportunity to license CP/M for a new family of disk subsystems for microcomputer maker IMSAI, Inc. Reluctant to adapt the code for another controller, Kildall worked with Ewing to split out the hardware dependent portions so they could be incorporated into a separate Basic Input Output System (BIOS). This allowed all 8080 and compatible microprocessor-based computers to run same the operating system on any new hardware with trivial modifications that could be accomplished by the designer in a couple of hours.

According to John Wharton, Intel’s technical liaison to DRI who became a DRI contractor and a friend of Kildall, this was “perhaps Gary’s most profound contribution … All previous computer software had targeted specific hardware environments. Gary isolated the system specific hardware interfaces of his OS within a set of “basic I/O system” routines, so it and all applications code would be fully machine independent. This idea created the third-party software industry by expanding the potential market several orders of magnitude.” [4]

Gordon Eubanks, who was a student of Kildall’s at NPS, identifies another significant contribution: “While I think separating out the BIOS was very important, to me the actual breakthrough was the dynamic relocation of the OS so it could run at high memory on any size system with at least 16K of RAM. I met with him the morning after he figured out how to do this and he was floating.” [5]

THE “GRASSROOTS” EFFECT

Dr. Dobbs Journal, “All-CP/M Issue!” January 1980. Copyright: Dr Dobbs (www.drdobbs.com)

With the release of CP/M version 1.3, customers responded to articles such as “Upgraded CP/M floppy disc operating system now available” published in the magazine Dr Dobbs’ Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia in late 1976 by purchasing disks at $70 per copy. According to Kildall, “In the months that followed, the nature of the computer hobbyist became apparent … CP/M gradually gained popularity through a ‘grassroots’ effect.” [1]

A licensing deal concluded with IMSAI bestowed credibility across the industry. CP/M became accepted as a standard and was offered by most early personal computer manufacturers, including pioneers Altair, Amstrad, Kaypro, and Osborne. With a SoftCard, a Zilog Z80 microprocessor -based add-in card built by Microsoft, it also ran on the Apple II to enable popular applications such as Word Star and dBASE that were originally written for CP/M. Microsoft licensed CP/M from DRI to re-sell with the card.

In 1978 Dorothy and Gary purchased a Victorian house on Lighthouse Avenue in Pacific Grove and converted the spacious two-story residence into their company headquarters. One of their first recruits, Tom Rolander joined from Intel in 1979 and immediately set to work writing MP/M, a compatible multi-tasking version of CP/M.

By 1980 DRI employed more than 20 people and Fortune magazine reported that the company generated revenue of $3.5 million. [6] The same article noted that Microsoft earned about the same total over the prior 5 years combined, some of these sales being derived from reselling CP/M licenses. By 1982 DRI disclosed annualized sales in excess of $20 million and that “More than a million people are now using CP/M controlled systems.” [7]

DRI staff outside the headquarters office, Pacific Grove CA, November 1980. Photo: Copyright John Pierce

MEANWHILE IN SEATTLE

In 1980 Rod Brock, owner of Seattle Computer Products, had developed a system using the 8086, a powerful new 16-bit microprocessor from Intel. Impatient for CP/M-86, DRI’s promised upgrade for the new chip, his programmer Tim Paterson filled the gap by writing an operating system known initially as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and later called 86-DOS. According to Paterson “if there had been a CP/M for the 8086 microprocessor, 86-DOS would never have been developed.”

“I used the 1976 CP/M Interface Guide for my description of the requirements.” To help developers port their software products from the 8080 to the 8086, “I also provided some similar commands from the console,” said Paterson. “So 86-DOS generally had all the same application visible elements as CP/M—the function codes, the entry, point address, part of the File Control Block layout, etc.” [8] He had written his operating system to emulate the ‘look-and-feel’ of CP/M.

In July 1980, IBM assigned Philip “Don” Estridge to develop a desktop computer for the mass market. To get the IBM PC, as it became known, to market as quickly as possible, he used commercially available components, including the Intel 8088 (a lower-cost version of the 8086). When an IBM procurement team visited Bill Gates in Redmond, Washington to license Microsoft’s BASIC interpreter program he referred them to DRI for an operating system.

BACK IN PACIFIC GROVE

When the IBM team arrived in Pacific Grove they met with Dorothy and worked with company attorney Gervaise “Gerry” Davis to settle the terms of a non-disclosure agreement. Gary, who had flown his aircraft to Oakland to meet an important customer, returned as scheduled to discuss technical matters. The meeting ended in an impasse over financial terms. IBM wished to purchase CP/M outright, whereas DRI sought a per-copy royalty payment in order to protect its existing base of business. With some alternative approaches in mind, Kildall tried to renew the negotiations a week later but IBM did not respond.

In the meantime, Gates negotiated terms to purchase 86-DOS from Brock. He then sold a one-time, non-exclusive license to IBM, who used the designation PC DOS, but retained the right to license the product as MS-DOS to others. When Kildall discovered that the function calls of the programmer’s application interface were identical to those of the CP/M Interface Guide that was copyrighted and marked “Proprietary to Digital Research” he threatened IBM with a lawsuit.

Kildall and Davis negotiated a resolution that required IBM to market CP/M-86 alongside PC DOS. However the list price differential, $40 vs. $240 for the DRI product, discouraged consumer interest in the latter. Davis says “IBM clearly betrayed the impression they gave Gary and me.” [2]

AFTERMATH

DRI continued to thrive for several years. CP/M-86 paved the way for a host of new products. CP/Net allowed cheap, simple microcomputers with no local disk storage to operate as clients from a central multiprogramming server. Concurrent CP/M-86 offered a multi-tasking operating system for the IBM PC-XT. Kildall acquired Gordon Eubanks’ Compiler Systems Inc. for CBASIC and appointed him to head a language division. Both of these programs continue in daily use worldwide embedded in OS 4690, IBM’s operating system for point-of-sale terminals. The company also introduced operating systems with windowing capability and menu-driven user interfaces years before Apple and Microsoft.

In other pursuits, Kildall founded KnowledgeSet with Tom Rolander where they created the first CD-ROM encyclopedia for Grolier. Brian Halla, Intel’s technical liaison to DRI, recalls that he “showed me this VAX 11/780 that he had running in his basement and he was so proud of it and he said, ‘I figured out a way to have a computer generate animation,’ and he said, ‘Watch this. And he runs a demo of a Coke bottle that starts real slowly and starts spinning and so as maybe several months went by, he lost interest in this and he sold his setup to a little company called Pixar.’” [9]

At its peak DRI employed over 500 people and opened operations in Asia and Europe. However by the mid-1980s, in the struggle with the juggernaut created by the combined efforts of IBM and Microsoft, DRI had lost the basis of its operating systems business. Gordon Eubanks recalls that “It became clear to me that Digital Research did not have the will to win and they were losing opportunities. So I went off and did my own thing.” [10]

Dispirited, Kildall, who never enjoyed the responsibility of managing a large company or displayed the business acumen of Gates, and the other investors sold the company to Novell Inc. of Provo Utah in 1991. Ultimately Novell closed the California operation and in 1996 disposed of the assets to Caldera, Inc., which used DRI intellectual property assets to prevail in a lawsuit against Microsoft. [11]

After leaving DRI, Kildall continued to innovate. He moved to Austin, Texas where he founded Prometheus Light and Sound to explore wireless home networking technology and participated in charitable work for pediatric AIDS.

Gary Kildall died at age 52 following an accident in Monterey in 1994. His ashes were buried in Seattle, the hometown that he shared with Bill Gates.

THE LEGACY OF GARY KILDALL

In 1995, the Software and Information Industry Association presented a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award to Gary Kildall citing eight significant areas in which he contributed to the microcomputer industry.

Despite these widely recognized technical accomplishments, his legacy remains mired in a tangle of myths and conspiracy theories. The most persistent being driven by a 1982 comment attributed to Bill Gates and published in the London Times newspaper that “Gary was out flying when IBM came to visit and that’s why they did not get the contract.” [2]

The former editor of the Times, Harold Evans atoned for that story in a PBS documentary and his book They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine. The subtitle of the chapter on Kildall, “He saw the future and made it work. He was the true founder of the personal computer revolution and the father of PC software,” offers a sympathetic telling of the life and times of the brilliant and flawed genius who helped give birth to the PC operating system 40 years ago this year.

IEEE Milestone plaque installed outside 801 Lighthouse Avenue, Pacific Grove, CA

On April 25, 2014, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering “The world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology” will install a bronze IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing plaque outside the former DRI headquarters at 801 Lighthouse Avenue, Pacific Grove, CA. The Milestone program honors important events in electrical engineering and computing. Achievements such Thomas Edison’s electric light bulb, Marconi’s wireless communications, and Bell Labs first transistor are recognized with a plaque in an appropriate location. The citation reads:

Dr. Gary A. Kildall demonstrated the first working prototype of CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) in Pacific Grove in 1974. Together with his invention of the BIOS (Basic Input Output System), Kildall’s operating system allowed a microprocessor-based computer to communicate with a disk drive storage unit and provided an important foundation for the personal computer revolution.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND REFERENCES

I would like to thank all those who have contributed information and background to this article, especially to Tom Rolander, John Wharton, and Herb Johnson who maintains a wealth of information on CP/M and the history of DRI on his website at: www.retrotechnology.com/dri/index.html

For more information about the IEEE plaque commemoration see: “Legacy of Gary Kildall - Event April 25, 2014” at www.facebook.com/KildallLegacy.

1. Kildall, Gary A., “The History of CP/M. The Evolution Of An Industry: One Person’s Viewpoint,” Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics, January 1980, No. 41, Vol. 5 Issue 1, pp. 6-7.

2. Evans, Harold, They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine, Back Bay Books (2004)

3. Torode, John, Email to the author. June 24, 2013

4. Wharton, John, “Gary Kildall, Industry Pioneer, Dead at 52,” Microprocessor Report August 1, 1994 Vol. 8, No. 10.

5. Eubanks, Gordon, Email to the author. February 27, 2014.

6. Uttal, Bro, “The Coming Struggle in Personal Computers,” Fortune, June 29, 1981, p. 87.

7. Digital Research Corporate Profile, brochure (1982).

8. Paterson, Tim, “The origins of DOS” Microprocessor Report, October 3, 1994, Vol. 8, No. 13.

9. Halla, Brian, “Oral History Transcript,” Computer History Museum 2013-02-14

10. Eubanks, Gordon, “Recollections of Gary Kildall” DigitalResearch.biz, MaxFrame Corporation

11. “Reach Agreement to settle Antitrust Lawsuit” Microsoft and Caldera Press Release January 10, 2000.

Last year T.A. Associates, a venture capital firm, sensed a ready market in gene-splicing technology. But combing the field for a likely prospect, the firm found no candidate worth the investment. So T.A. Associates formed its own company by bringing together leading scientists in the field.

The result was Immunogen, a concern headed by Dr. Baruj Benacerraf, a Nobel laureate, and scientists from Harvard, M.I.T., Yale and leading research laboratories.

The evolution of Immunogen from a concept to a functioning company illustrates how venture capitalists are increasingly acting as trailblazers in starting and building unseasoned enterprises, rather than waiting for entrepreneurs to come along seeking backing.

''Back in the 1970's, venture capitalists were more or less in the driver's seat. When we offered money to a company, few questions were asked,'' said C. Kevin Landry, a partner with T A. Associates, based in Boston. ''Now, there's a lot more venture capital money around, and we can't wait for these things to fall into our lap. You have to make your own opportunities.'' Developing a Management Team

The new genetic engineering company started by T.A. Associates plans to develop a line of therapeutic drugs to fight cancer and other diseases, although the scientific techniques involved in producing the necessary substances remain largely untested. Meanwhile, T.A. Associates, with its venture capital partner, the Inco Securities Corporation, is busy building a management team to sell Immunogen's products - if and when the time comes.

T.A. Associates' skill in developing lucrative positions in such risky embryonic fields as genetic engineering and microelectronics has made it one of the most successful venture capital firms in the country.

In the past decade, T.A. Associates' return on its investments have averaged 30 percent to 40 percent. And the amount of capital available has grown from $5 million in 1969, when the firm was founded, to more than $125 million, ranking it first among independent venture capitalists, according to Venture, a trade magazine.

As Mr. Landry sees it, the key to successful venture capitalism is a keen sense of where new industries are forming and the ability to seek out companies in the forefront. Although the odds against finding a winner are high - nationally an estimated half of all such initial investments are eventually written off as tax losses - the returns can also be startlingly high. The Biogen Challenge

Three years ago, for example, T.A. Associates formed Biogen S.A. to exploit the commercial potential of advanced microbiology, principally DNA recombinant technology and advanced mutational technology. The development of Biogen presented even greater obstacles than most new companies, a T.A. Associates spokesman said, because many of the leading scientists in molecular biology lived and worked in Europe. The solution was to base the new company in Geneva and to build laboratories there as well as in Cambridge, Mass.

The strategy paid off: T.A. Associates and Inco, its venture capital partner, have seen the worth of Biogen, in which their initial investment was $150,000, swell to more than $9 million today.

Another crucial factor in successful venture capital investing is the ability to move with speed and decisiveness, industry experts say. Mr. Landry, for example, took only 48 hours to commit $1.8 million for 37 percent of Artificial Intelligence, a software firm based in Waltham, Mass. ''It's important to be able to make a quick decision on a good deal before someone else stumbles across it,'' Mr. Landry said.

T.A. Associates has also apparently scored another timely success with one of its most recent investments, Digital Research. This month it was announced that the small California-based manufacturer of computer software was chosen as a key subcontractor for the International Business Machines Corporation's new personal computer system. Searching for Growing Concern

T.A. Associates' search for an entry into the small but flourishing microcomputer software market started last October. ''We wanted to find a company in the microcomputer industry with sales in the $1 million-to-$2 million range, but who in two or three years would be pulling in $100 million,'' said Jacqueline Morby, a vice president at T.A. Associates, who supervised the firm's entry into this field.

''I started simply by browsing through computer trade magazines and paying attention to the largest ads - I said to myself, this must be more than just a garage type operation if it could afford to place a $4,000 ad in a magazine,'' Mrs. Morby said.

From there, she winnowed the field of investment candidates by calling them up and questioning them about their companies. After several weeks of research, Mrs. Morby narrowed her choices to three companies that might be potential investments for a venture capitalist.

Back then, Digital Research, the creation of Gary Kildall, 39 years old, a microcomputer software expert, was still a small producer. Although the company had penetrated an impressive share of its market - more than 300 companies were already using its operating system - most of its management decisions were handled by a small group of employees trained primarily in computer science.

Mrs. Morby said that Dr. Kildall designed ''the most beautiful market strategy for a company that I'd ever seen. But like most entrepreneurs, he thought that all a venture provided was money - and we had to convince them that we had more to offer than that.'' Digital's 'Big Decision'

As Mrs. Morby saw it, Digital Research represented an ideal opportunity for T.A. Associates' investor group to become partners in a company that was a market leader in a completely new industry that had taken shape in the last two years.

''To become partners with a venture capitalist was a big decision for them - Dr. Kildall had a beautiful little company; he had to decide whether to remain private or to take on partners, possibly go public and become an industry leader - a household name like Apple - which is possible,''

When Gary Kildall inspects his company's production floor and shipping dock, he walks through a kitchen, out to a patio where the company cat is sunning itself and into a former carriage house.

There, Digital Research Inc. stockpiles its product - magnetic disks that contain software that International Business Machines has selected to operate its new personal computer.

From headquarters in a yellow Victorian house in this quiet seaside village 125 miles south of San Francisco, Digital Research and its president, Mr. Kildall, function in a casual manner that belies the concern's leading position in the fast-paced microcomputer industry. Changing Structure

But now, to cope with increased competition and larger contracts, such as that with I.B.M., Digital Research must change. It is formalizing its management structure, accepting venture-capital financing, altering its pricing policies and even planning to expand into a 16,000-square-foot modern office building, with a view of the ocean, of course.

All this business, quite frankly, is more than Mr. Kildall cares to deal with. ''Basically I am a gadget-oriented person,'' the jeansclad Mr. Kildall said. ''I like to work with dials and knobs. I'm not a very competitive person. I'm forced into it.''

Pacific Grove, a picturesque town near the artists colony of Carmel and a two-hour drive from California's Silicon Valley, seems an unlikely place for a computer concern. But there, in a small cottage near Monterey Bay, Mr. Kildall invented in the early 1970's what is now Digital Research's main product, an operating system. Computer Traffic Policeman

Acting like a traffic policeman, an operating system is a type of software that directs a personal computer's activities. For example, if a user wants access to certain information, the operating system tells the computer how to retrieve it.

In 1975 Mr. Kildall licensed what has become the leading operating system for microcomputers. It is called CP/ M, for Control Program for Microcomputers. The operating system was selected by the Xerox Corporation for its Xerox 820 office system and by I.B.M. as an option for its personal computer, set for delivery in October.

Despite his preference for the laboratory over the board room, Mr. Kildall, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science, has built his company to 50 employees in six years. For the year ended Aug. 31, the privately held concern had sales of about $6 million, and Mr. Kildall expects $10 million in revenues this fiscal year.

''They're doing terrific; they must be smiling from ear to ear with the I.B.M. contract,'' said Ulric Weil, an analyst with Morgan Stanley & Company. Optimistic About Sales

''Within five years, I think sales will be $100 million,'' said Dorothy McEwan, Mr. Kildall's wife and high school sweetheart of 19 years ago. She has handled the financial and marketing aspects of the business since the two started Digital Research in a 10-foot-by-13-foot playroom at their first Pacific Grove home, a cottage a few blocks from the ocean.

But the expansion has become too much for Mrs. McEwan to supervise. ''The company grew so rapidly that we had gone from small-time to a big-time operation, and we had to have professional managers,'' she said.

After having venture capit alists knocking at his door for three years, Mr. Ki ldall recognized earlier this year that he should let them come in. Mr. Kildall said he did not need their money, but wanted their expertise so he would not need to ''take chances'' with business deci sions.

Last month, giving up only a small share of ownership, he brought in four: T.A. Associates of Boston, Hambrecht & Quist of San Francisco, Venrock Associates of New York and Page Mills Partners of Palo Alto. Changed Licensing Methods

Under their counsel, Digital Research changed the structure of its sales agreements. In the past, the concern licensed its CP/M software to microcomputer makers for a one-time fee of $50,000. The simple arrangement was a bargain for manufacturers, said David Crockett, senior vice president of Dataquest Inc., a Cupertino, Calif., market research concern.

Since Sept. 1, Digital Research has required graduated payment based on the number of computers sold by the manufacturer. Details of the contract with I.B.M. were not available.

The simple arrangement bought CP/M market penetration, however. About 300 computer makers use CP/ M, which means that Mr. Kildall's operating system is driving some 250,000 microcomputers, according to Digital Research. These computers range in price from $1,000 for home systems to $30,000 for small-business systems.

At least 300 companies supply more than 1,000 software packages based on CP/M. Apple Computer Inc., the No.1 maker of personal computers, uses its own proprietary system, but users can purchase a plug-in peripheral card to adapt their Apple computers to CP/ M, thus making more applications software, especially business packages, available to them. Competition from Bell

CP/M's strongest competition may come from Unix, an operating system developed by Bell Laboratories for 16-bit microprocessors. ''Unix is competition at the higher end,'' said Mr. Weil of Morgan Stanley.

Unix will likely be used most by universities and by the Bell System, Dataquest's Mr. Crockett said, while CP/ M ''will own the rest of the world.''

Previously, CP/M was used in the slower, eight-bit computers. Now, Digital Research has developed CP/ M-86, ordered by I.B.M., for 16-bit machines.

Digital Research plans to branch into programming languages for computers. Just last week it purchased for an undisclosed amount Compiler Systems Inc., a small southern California concern that develops languages.

''The company has a lot of potential,'' the soft-spoken Mr. Kildall said. ''I want to let the potential loose.'' He also said that he expected having a larger team would allow him to spend more time where he most likes to be -at a computer terminal.

SEYMOUR MERRIN, owner of the Computerworks store in Westport, Conn.,couldn't wait to start carrying I.B.M.'s new personal computer in the fall of 1981. The product was destined for success, he felt, and would be a strong addition to any computer store's product line.

What Mr. Merrin didn't anticipate, however, was that the I.B.M. computer would come to dominate his sales so much that it would make him nervous. ''Right now, it's the bulk of my business, overwhelmingly,'' said the dealer, who is trying to push Apple computers to counteract I.B.M.'s influence. ''One does not want to have one vendor or one customer dominate one's business. Any dealer who is not concerned with that is out of his gourd.''

So it has been with the International Business Machines Corporation's entry into the personal computer business. Everyone expected the computer giant to be successful. The mere fact that it was I.B.M., a company that has muscled others out of the way to dominate the computer industry, virtually assured it would be a leader in the personal computer business. ''They don't have to be the best, they just have to be competitive,'' said Peter Wright, an analyst with the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn.

Nevertheless, the speed and extent to which I.B.M. has been successful has surprised many people, including I.B.M. itself. That is especially so since success was achieved with an unspectacular machine - albeit a well-designed one - made of off-the-shelf parts supplied by others.

Now, after 18 months in the market, I.B.M. has caught up to longtime leaders Apple Computer Inc. and the Tandy Corporation (makers of Radio Shack computers), and most market researchers expect I.B.M. to surge ahead of everyone this year or the next. Analysts estimate that I.B.M. sold 175,000 to 200,000 computers in 1982, its first full year on the market, and will sell at least 400,000 to 500,000 this year, helped by I.B.M.'s expansion to the overseas market and by a new, more powerful version of its personal computer introduced late last month. The company is also planning additional products, including a home computer selling for under $1,000 - code-named the Peanut - that is expected to be introduced by the end of the year. But I.B.M.'s importance in the industry is greater than its current market share of roughly 20 percent would indicate. Indeed, to some extent, I.B.M.'s role in the personal computer world is beginning to resemble its central role in the mainframe computer business, in which I.B.M. is the sun around which everything else revolves. The I.B.M. personal computer has become a de facto standard for personal computers in its price range of $2,500 to $5,000. Virtually every software company is giving first priority to writing programs for the I.B.M. machine. And more than 20 companies have already introduced I.B.M. ''clones'' - computers that are interchangeable or almost interchangeable with the I.B.M. computer, allowing the computers to use software written for the I.B.M. machine and to be sold to I.B.M.'s vast and continuously growing customer base. Indeed, as happened first with the Apple II, an entire subindustry has sprung up to supply parts, accessories and advice for the I.B.M. personal computer. Two of the top four computer magazines in terms of advertising pages in February were exclusively devoted to the I.B.M. computer, according to Adtrak Inc., an advertising tracking service in Mountainview, Calif.

The emergence of I.B.M. will hasten a shakeout that is inevitable in an industry with more than 100 suppliers. Nevertheless, Apple still remains strong. And some other potential big hitters are coming into the market, most notably the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's American Bell unit.

But just as important as its effect on the industry is the effect of the personal computer on I.B.M. itself. The computer will account for $1 billion to $2 billion in I.B.M. revenues this year, a tiny fraction of I.B.M.'s expected total of $35 to $40 billion.

Yet the computer is attracting increasing attention within I.B.M. as a pivotal product in its overall office automation thrust. ''They're rethinking their entire strategy,'' said H. Donald Haback, a consultant and analyst at Freimark Blair & Company, an investment research firm.

Integrating the personal computer into I.B.M.'s overall strategy is becoming imperative. Already, the personal computer is proving so versatile that it is eating into sales of other, sometimes more expensive, I.B.M. products such as terminals, word processors and more expensive computers. ''I.B.M. doesn't want the personal computer to cannibalize its other products,'' said the head of a large software company.

One victim already appears to be the System/23 Datamaster, a $10,000 computer introduced just two weeks before the personal computer and then all but lost in the excitement over the PC. And the potential for the PC to undermine I.B.M.'s more expensive word processor, the Displaywriter, was demonstrated this month when NBI Inc., a major word processing manufacturer, introduced an attachment for the personal computer that will turn it into an NBI word processor.

I.B.M.'s success in its new business stems largely from its success in the older computer markets. I.B.M. was expected to be successful and therefore received the retail shelf space and software support that are critical to making a product successful. Software companies have limited resources and generally concentrate on writing programs for the most popular computers.

''From the day it hit the marketplace, it was perceived by the software companies as a winner,'' said Mr. Merrin. ''Because they perceived it as a winner, they wrote software for it.'' And because much software is being written, the I.B.M. computer became more and more successful, a selffulfilling prophecy. And that generated more software in a snowball effect.

I.B.M. also had a big advantage in selling personal computers to large corporations, which already use its mainframes. Such companies are capable of ordering thousands of personal computers at a shot. And rather than having each employee choose a computer individually, the data processing manager - I.B.M.'s traditional customer - is gaining a bigger role in choosing which computers to use. The safe route for data processing managers has always been to buy I.B.M.

STILL, other companies with resources and reputations almost as large as I.B.M.'s - such as Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and Digital Equipment - have not made the same impact that I.B.M. has. To be successful, I.B.M. had to avoid major blunders. It exhibited an adroit ability to move quickly and to adapt to retail marketing, a new environment for it. ''I think they did nothing brilliant, but they did everything right,'' said Lee R. Greenhouse, assistant vice president for personal computer services at E.F. Hutton & Company.

I.B.M. decided to enter the personal computer business in the summer of 1980, when then-chairman Frank T. Cary gave the go-ahead, according to sources close to I.B.M. The company did not want to lose its chance for leadership in the microcomputer business in the same way it had let the Digital Equipment Corporation get the lead on it in minicomputers years earlier. Moreover, personal computers were starting to appear on the desks of its corporate customers. Some I.B.M. officials referred to the personal computer as the ''logo machine.

''I.B.M. didn't want to sell mainframes to a large company where four out of five managers had an Apple on his desk,'' said Sanford J. Garrett, an analyst at Paine Webber Mitchell Hutchins.

The assignment was given to a group in Boca Raton, Fla., which received an unusual amount of freedom from I.B.M. bureaucratic procedures and past practices. One year later, the machine, aptly named the Personal Computer, or PC for short, was introduced.

One departure from past practice was to rely on outsiders for parts and software. The heart of the computer was Intel Corporation's 8088 microprocessor, which was capable of handling 16 bits, or units, of information at a time, compared to the eight bits of information handled by most existing computers. That made the I.B.M. computer capable of handling more complex programs than earlier computers. Another nice but not spectacularly new feature was a keyboard that was detached from the screen and had plenty of keys for special functions.

I.B.M. also relied on outside companies to supply software for the machine, such as word processing and financial modeling packages. It used an operating system - the program that acts as a computer's traffic cop - from the Microsoft Corporation of Bellevue, Wash. Use of a publicly available operating system encouraged more software companies to write programs for the I.B.M. personal computer, yet also made it easier for other manufacturers to make computers compatible with the I.B.M. machine.

The operations were conducted in great secrecy and relations between I.B.M. and its young computer programming whizzes were at first somewhat awkward. ''If you haven't seen an I.B.M. nondisclosure agreement before, you wouldn't sign it,'' said Gary Kildall, chairman of Digital Research Inc., a software company whose CP/M-86 operating system is offered as an option for the personal computer.

I.B.M. also slowly and deliberately recruited the cream of Apple's dealers. Now there are 770 separate outlets selling the machine in the United States and Canada. The limited distribution at first meant a bonanza for those stores with the computer and it meant that in virtually every store, the I.B.M. machine became the best-selling line. In Computerland stores, a nationwide chain, only the Apple and the Osborne machines have at times sold in as high a volume as the I.B.M., said Edward E. Faber, president.

I.B.M. has also been careful to avoid marketing the product through too many channels in an attempt to prevent discounting. Apple dealers often complained they spent time with customers convincing them to buy a computer only to find the customer actually make the purchase from a discount store like New York's 47th Street Photo.

Dealers are starting to face increasingly stiff competition from another quarter, however. I.B.M.'s own sales force is becoming more aggressive in selling the computers and it was recently authorized to offer greater discounts to large accounts. That largely reflects the changing view within I.B.M. of the importance of the computer as the potential future workstation that may one day be on every office worker's desk.

I.B.M. might make the personal computer its universal terminal. The same basic unit can be stamped out and then modified at the end to act as either a terminal, a computer, or a word processor. ''It will give I.B.M. incredible economies in manufacturing,'' said Frank R. Gens of the Yankee Group, a telecommunications consulting firm.

I.B.M. has already introduced options that allow the personal computer to play the part of a computer terminal and retrieve data from I.B.M. mainframe computers in large corporations. It recently introduced an option that would turn its terminals into personal computers. Since there are an estimated 1.5 million terminals in use, conversion of a fraction of them to personal computers could represent a significant addition to the personal computer base.

I.B.M. is also pushing into new markets, such as the home. An inexpensive computer, code-named ''Peanut,'' is expected to be introduced before the end of the year. It is expected the machine would sell for less than $1,000, come with 64 K bytes, or more than 64,000 typed characters of memory, and would be at least partly compatible with the existing personal computer. It would compete in the upper end of the home market against machines such as the Apple IIe, the Commodore 64 and Atari 1200.

I.B.M.'s presence is hurting other companies but is not yet killing them because the overall market is growing at a rapid rate. In addition, technology is changing quickly and there are many niches for companies to position themselves around I.B.M.

The introduction of the I.B.M. machine virtually choked off sales of the Apple III, the Apple product most directly competitive. But Apple's main machine, the Apple IIe continues to sell well. Its new machine, the Lisa, is priced somewhat higher and might compete effectively by offering features not yet available on the I.B.M. computer. Tandy, which owns and franchises the Radio Shack chain, has an extremely broad line, from handheld devices to powerful desktop machines. Because it is mainly a retailer, it also has some flexibility to market products made by others.

Companies like Texas Instruments and Commodore have strength at the very low end, with products selling for a few hundred dollars or less, an area I.B.M. is not likely to invade immediately.

Meanwhile, other giants, such as the Digital Equipment Corporation, Wang and NCR are only now starting to enter the 16-bit computer market and should diminish I.B.M.'s dominance of that segment. A.T.& T.'s American Bell subsidiary is also planning an assault on the market. And the Japanese companies, which have made a weak showing so far, are expected to get stronger. I.B.M.'S LUCRATIVE COATTAILS

As I.B.M. has swept to the forefront of the personal computer business, an entire subindustry has evolved and managed to profit from the product, either by selling directly to I.B.M. or to the market, or from receiving I.B.M.'s endorsement.

Among the most obvious suppliers to profit are the Intel Corporation, which supplies the microprocessor to I.B.M., the Tandon Corporation, which has made most of the disk drives and the Microsoft Corporation, which makes the main operating system.

SCI Systems Inc. of Huntsville, Ala. is known to assemble the electronic circuit boards that are the guts of the I.B.M. personal computer. The company, traded over the counter, experienced a 52 percent revenue increase, to $90 million, in the year ended June 30, 1982, and analysts expect revenue to double in the current year. While the company would not comment, its 10K report shows that I.B.M. accounted for 41.4 percent of its revenues in fiscal year 1982, up from 18.7 percent in 1981.

Another potential market is in manufacturing computers that are compatible with the I.B.M. computer, meaning they can use software written for the P.C. Many industry observers think the Compaq Computer Corporation of Houston, which makes a portable compatible computer, is poised for meteoric growth.

Numerous other companies supply either software for the computer or hardware accessories such as disk drives, video displays, game paddles and extra memory. Hundreds of software products and hardware accessories have flooded the market.

The Quadram Corporation of Norcross, Ga., makes 20 different accessories. Its most popular product, the Quadboard, includes additional memory, a clock and calendar and communications ports for $600. Founded in 1981, Quadram was purchased by the Intelligent Systems Corporation in December 1982 in a stock deal valued at $35 million.

Living on the edges of I.B.M.'s business can be precarious, however. When a business gets too large, I.B.M. can reach out and recapture it. Recently I.B.M. introduced its own hard disk drive, color monitor and extra memory, cutting into the sales of independent companies that were supplying those products. It also reduced prices for its personal computer by about 15 percent, potentially hurting the compatible computer manufacturers.

EXPLODING MYTHS

These stories provide great insights into the history of IT companies. Sometimes they serve to explode long-stand-

ing industry myths. For example, many in the IT industry have heard the story that Gary Kildall, the founder of Digital Research, Inc., blew off a meeting with “the suits” from IBM regarding licensing the CP/M operating system to go gal- livanting in his private airplane. Supposedly the frustrated IBM folks turned to Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system for their PC, and DRI missed out on the greatest opportunity in the software industry.

Claims and counter-claims about this story have floated about for years. But Curt Geske was there. In his story “DRI and IBM—First Meeting,” Geske tells us the meeting was a rather mundane affair between Dorothy Kildall, who ran the business end of things, and IBM lawyers over the wording of a nondisclosure agreement. IBM made it known that Micro- soft already had a contract to do the work and expected DRI

to supply them with the full source code for CP/M, which DRI was understandably reluctant to do. DRI and IBM did eventually reach an agreement for IBM to distribute CP/M, but as recounted in Steve Maysonave’s videotaped story, the agreement was structured in a way that gave all the advantage to Microsoft. The outcome was consistent with the legend, but it hinged on the intricacies of contract negotiations rather than on Gary’s preference for flying over attending meetings

Seattle native and software pioneer Gary Kildall, who died Monday at age 52, never let on publicly how he felt about losing dominance of the personal computer industry to hometown rival Bill Gates.

But in "Computer Connections," his privately circulated memoir, Mr. Kildall is blunt:

"I have grown up in the industry with Gates. He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry."

It's not the first time the Microsoft billionaire - who built a software empire on BASIC, a computer language invented at Dartmouth; MS-DOS, a program he purchased, and Windows, modeled after Apple Computer's Macintosh - has been called predatory. But Mr. Kildall, an easygoing type who co-hosted a public-TV show on computers called "Computer Chronicles," previously had shied from pointing the finger. Gates was unavailable for comment. A Microsoft spokeswoman said Gates "regrets Gary passed away at such a young age, and it's a loss to the industry." But, she said, "no one can deny the size and strength of the personal-computer industry that has been made possible by MS-DOS and Intel technologies becoming the standard."

Mr. Kildall, who was en route to Seattle to visit relatives, died in a Monterey, Calif., hospital. The cause of death has not been determined. A press release issued by the county coroner said Mr. Kildall was injured late Friday at a Monterey restaurant but refused treatment.

Early Saturday, an ambulance was summoned to his home, and Mr. Kildall was taken to a hospital, then released. He was readmitted Sunday and stayed in the hospital until his death.

A service will be held in Seattle on Tuesday.

In his book-length memoir, Mr. Kildall acknowledged his sentiments about Gates are "sour grapes" but he defends his version of events as "the whole truth."

Associates are trying to have the memoir, which was shown to The Seattle Times, published by a trade press. Mr. Kildall spent two years writing it and did a limited printing for family and friends last fall.

Wrote one of the first systems

Twenty years ago, Mr. Kildall wrote CP/M, the first popular operating system for desktop computers. Called by some the father of personal computing for that contribution, Mr. Kildall became better known for something he didn't do.

In 1980, IBM needed an operating system for its personal computer project and was directed by Gates to Mr. Kildall's Digital Research Inc. in Pacific Grove, Calif. To run applications, a computer needs an operating system. IBM wanted to ship one with each of its new PCs.

In a frequently told story with numerous conflicting versions, IBM visited Digital Research, only to be rebuffed when Mr. Kildall's wife at that time, Dorothy McEwen, balked at signing a form limiting disclosure of the relationship between the companies.

Gates later told interviewers "Gary went flying" at the pivotal historical moment. But Mr. Kildall wrote that he returned from flying his Piper Turbo Arrow to a business appointment in the afternoon, signed the agreement and began negotiating a deal with IBM.

IBM wanted to purchase CP/M-86 outright for $250,000, but Mr. Kildall held out for the standard royalty of $10 a copy.

Mr. Kildall's version has never been confirmed. Jack Sams, an IBM program manager at the time, said Mr. Kildall was missing from most of the meeting but "might have been there at the time they signed the letter (nondisclosure agreement)." Mr. Kildall's ex-wife McEwen declined comment. Gerry Davis, his attorney at the time, did not return phone calls.

Tom Rolander, a Digital Research executive then, said he was with Mr. Kildall on the San Jose trip and at the meeting. He declined to give details but said, "a careful analysis of the whole relationship will indicate how ruthless IBM and Gates were, and how innocent Gary was." Mr. Kildall "was not a Gates-type person. He was an inventor of technology, not a businessman."

Gates steps into breach

When IBM returned without a deal, Gates purchased an operating system from Seattle Computer Products called QDOS, for Quick and Dirty Operating System, for use on the IBM PC. After renaming the program MS-DOS, Microsoft licensed it to makers of IBM PC "clones," making it by the mid-1980s the prevailing operating system for personal computers.

When Mr. Kildall, who had shown IBM his system, saw an early copy of DOS, he was incensed over similarities between the two. At a meeting with IBM, he agreed not to sue for copyright infringement if IBM marketed his program. IBM later priced CP/M at $240 but charged only $40 for DOS.

"The pricing difference set by IBM killed CP/M-86," Mr. Kildall wrote in the book. IBM's Sams acknowledged the price difference but said it reflected Mr. Kildall's higher price to IBM, which he recalls as $100 a unit.

Mr. Kildall, who knew Gates from the latter's early computing days at C-Cubed, a University District computer center, made millions from CP/M. But he was destined to be cast as the guy who lost the big one.

Mr. Kildall's and Gates' paths crossed often. In 1977 the two discussed merging their companies while Gates tried to decide where to move Microsoft, then in Albuquerque.

Mr. Kildall later offered to sell Digital Research for $26 million to Gates, who told him the company was worth no more than $10 million. In 1991, Digital Research was sold for $120 million to Novell.

Teaching, then work at Intel

While studying at the UW in the late 1960s, Mr. Kildall had entered the Navy. When given the choice between serving in Vietnam or teaching at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, he chose the latter. In 1973 he went to work for Intel, which today supplies chips for 80 percent of the world's personal computers. In 1976 he founded Intergalactic Digital Research. He soon shortened the name.

Mr. Kildall licensed CP/M to IMSAI, an early personal-computer manufacturer. By 1980 it had become the industry standard.

In an appendix, Mr. Kildall reprints copies of code for CP/M and DOS showing, he maintains, that the first 26 lines, or calls, are identical. Seattleite Tim Paterson, author of QDOS, has acknowledged that it was modeled after CP/M but denies it was a direct copy. In his book, Mr. Kildall calls it "plain and simple theft."

Mr. Kildall wrote he was advised by Davis, his attorney, not to sue. At the time, the software community widely imitated one another's work. Later, suing over "look and feel" and copyright or patent infringement became a means of protecting what became intellectual property potentially worth billions.

Mr. Kildall stayed with Digital Research through the 1980s and worked on a variety of ventures. He was residing in Austin, Texas, at the time of his death.

"We all thought Gary was a genius," said his sister, Patricia Guberlet of Seattle. "He was a genuinely likable person" who never received recognition tantamount to his contribution, she added.

"He paved the way for everybody," said a cousin, Tom Kildall, a Seattle marine-insurance broker. "When I talked to him about it (the lost IBM deal), it was like, `That's the way it goes.' All it would have gotten him was more money, and he wasn't poor."

Gary attended high school at Lincoln in Wallingford but graduated from Queen Anne High in 1960, his sister said. He enrolled at the UW in 1963 and earned a doctorate in computer science.

Mr. Kildall is survived by his mother, Emma, of Seattle; his sister; an uncle, Bob, of Seattle; a daughter, Kristin, of Seattle, and son Scott of Oakland. Services will be held tomorrow in Monterey and 11 a.m. Tuesday in Seattle's Trinity Parish Episcopal Church at 609 Eighth Ave. Donations may be made to Make-A-Wish Foundation.

PHOTO; Caption: 1) GARY KILDALL 2) BILL GATES

Copyright 1994

The death of Gary Kildall, who's been called the father of the personal computer, is being investigated by California police as a possible homicide.

Kildall, 52, a Seattle native who devised a computer-operating system known as CP/M, died Monday in Monterey, Calif., of what a coroner's report described as a traumatic head injury.

The report on the cause of death also said that Kildall suffered from chronic alcoholism, which it cited as a contributing medical condition. The coroner's report said the fatal injury may have taken place "as a result of foul play" and the incident was being turned over to the Monterey Police Department.

"We're going to investigate it as a possible homicide," said police Sgt. Frank Sollecito. "I'm not going to flat-out say it's a homicide."

Kildall was injured at the Franklin Street Bar & Grill on July 8 but refused medical treatment. He was taken to a hospital the following day and released.

But he was readmitted Sunday and died the following day.

Kildall could have died either from a blow to the head or from hitting his head as he fell, said Sollecito.

The first description of the incident at the bar, he said, was that Kildall had been in the bar between two to 20 minutes. Then witnesses "turned around, and he was on the floor," the sergeant said.

But Sollecito said stories are changing. "That version isn't going to hold up," he said.

Medical evidence of chronic alcoholism was found during the autopsy, said Sgt. Jim Smith, coroner-division commander for the Monterey County Sheriff's Department.

Kildall's CP/M was considered by IBM as a possible operating system for its new personal computers in 1980. But according to computer-age lore, IBM instead chose a competing system known as MS-DOS, buying it from another Seattle man named Bill Gates, who ran a company called Microsoft.

Kildall later wrote a private memoir that included a description of the IBM deal, entitling it "Computer Connections." In it, he told how he thought he had an agreement with IBM but the proper documents never were signed and the deal slipped away.

Gates has told his own version of the deal and of how Kildall lost it by going flying instead of attending a meeting with IBM. Numerous conflicting versions of the supposed arrangements exist.

Kildall later sold his company, Digital Research, for $120 million, and Gates went on to make billions of dollars through Microsoft.

You have to wonder what it was we were doing before we had all these computers in our lives. Same stuff, pretty much. Down at the auto parts store, the counterman had to get a ladder and climb way the heck up to reach some top shelf, where he'd feel around in a little box and find out that the muffler clamps were all gone. Today he uses a computer, which tells him that there are three muffler clamps sitting in that same little box on the top shelf. But he still has to get the ladder and climb up to get them, and, worse still, sometimes the computer lies, and there are no muffler clamps at all, spoiling the digital perfection of the auto parts world as we have come to know it.

What we're often looking for when we add the extra over head of building a computer into our businesses and our lives is certainty. We want something to believe in, something that will take from our shoulders the burden of knowing when to reorder muffler clamps. In the twelfth century, before there even were muffler clamps, such certainty came in the form of a belief in God, made tangible through the building of cathedrals—places where God could be accessed. For lots of us today, the belief is more in the sanctity of those digital zeros and ones, and our cathedral is the personal computer. In a way, we're replacing God with Bill Gates.

Uh-oh.

The problem, of course, is with those zeros and ones. Yes or no, right or wrong, is what those digital bits seem to signify, looking so clean and unconflicted that we forget for a moment about that time in the eighth grade when Miss Schwerko humiliated us all with a true-false test. The truth is, that for all the apparent precision of computers, and despite the fact that our mothers andTom Peters would still like to believe that perfection is attainable in this life, computer and software companies are still remarkably imprecise places, and their products reflect it.

And why shouldn't they, since we're still at the fumbling stage, where good and bad developments seem to happen at random. Look at Intel, for example. Up to this point in the story, Intel comes off pretty much as high-tech heaven on earth. As the semiconductor company that most directly begat the personal computer business, Intel invented the microprocessor and memory technologies used in PCs and acted as an example of how a high-tech company should be organized and managed.

But that doesn't mean that Bob Noyce's crew didn't screw up occasionally.

There was a time in the early 1980s when Intel suffered terrible quality problems. It was building microprocessors and other parts by the millions and by the millions these parts tested bad. The problem was caused by dust, the major enemy of computer chip makers. When your business relies on printing metal lic traces that are only a millionth of an inch wide, having adust mote ten times that size come rolling across a silicon wafer means that some traces won't be printed correctly and some parts won't work at all.A few bad parts are to be expected, since there are dozens, sometimes hundreds, printed on a single wafer, which is later cut into individual components. But Intel was suddenly getting as many bad parts as good, and that was bad for business.

Semiconductor companies fight dust by building their components in expensive clean rooms, where technicians wear surgical masks, paper booties, rubber gloves, and special suits and where the air is specially filtered. Intel had plenty of clean rooms, but it still had a big dust problem, so the engineers cleverly decided that the wafers were probably dusty before they ever arrived at Intel. The wafers were made in the East by Monsanto.

Suddenly it was Monsanto's dust problem.

Monsanto engineers spent months and millions trying to eliminate every last speck of dust from their silicon wafer production facility in South Carolina. They made what they thought was terrific progress, too, though it didn't show in Intel's production yields, which were still terrible. The funny thing was that Monsanto's other customers weren't complaining. IBM, for example, wasn't complaining, and IBM was a very picky customer, always asking for wafers that were extra-big or extra small or triangular instead of round. IBM was having no dust problems.

If Monsanto was clean and Intel was clean, the only remain ing possibility was that the wafers somehow got dusty on their trip between the two companies, so the Monsanto engineers hired a private investigator to tail the next shipment of wafers to Intel. Their private eye uncovered an Intel shipping clerk who was opening incoming boxes of super-clean silicon wafers and then counting out the wafers by hand into piles on a super-unclean desktop, just to make sure that Bob Noyce was getting every silicon wafer he was paying for.

The point of this story goes far beyond the undeification of Intel to a fundamental characteristic of most high-tech businesses. There is a business axiom that management gurus spout and that big-shot industrialists repeat to themselves as a mantra if they want to sleep well at night. The axiom says that when a business grows past $1 billion in annual sales, it becomes too large for any one individual to have a significant impact. Alas, this is not true when it's a $1 billion high-tech business, where too often the critical path goes right through the head of one particular programmer or engineer or even through the head of a well-meaning clerk down in the shipping department. Remember that Intel was already a $1 billion company when it was brought to its knees by desk dust.

The reason that there are so many points at which a chip, a computer, or a program is dependent on just one person is that the companies lack depth. Like any other new industry, this is one staffed mainly by pioneers, who are, by definition, a small minority. People in critical positions in these organizations don't usually have backup, so when they make a mistake, the whole company makes a mistake.

My estimate, in fact, is that there are only about twenty-five real people in the entire personal computer industry—this ship ping clerk at Intel and around twenty-four others. Sure, Apple Computer has 10,000 workers, or says it does, and IBM claims nearly 400,000 workers worldwide, but has to be lying. Those workers must be temps or maybe androids because I keep running into the same two dozen people at every company I visit.

Maybe it's a tax dodge. Finish this book and you'll see; the companies keep changing, but the names are always the same. Intel begat the microprocessor and the dynamic random access memory chip, which made possible MITS, the first of many per sonal computer companies with a stupid name. And MITS, in turn, made possible Microsoft,, because computer hardware must exist, or at least be claimed to exist, before programmers can

even envision software for it. Just as cave dwellers didn't squat with their flint tools chipping out parking brake assemblies for 1967 Buicks, so programmers don't write software that has no computer upon which to run. Hardware nearly always leads soft ware, enabling new development, which is why Bill Gates's con version from minicomputers to microcomputers did not come (could not come) until 1974, when he was a sophomore at Harvard University and the appearance of the MITS Altair 8800 computer made personal computer software finally possible.

Like the Buddha, Gates's enlightenment came in a flash. Walking across Harvard Yard while Paul Allen waved in his face the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics announcing the Altair 8800 microcomputer from MITS, they both saw instantly that there would really be a personal computer industry and that the industry would need programming languages. Although there were no microcomputer software companies yet, 19-year-old Bill's first concern was that they were already too late. "We realized that the revolution might happen without us," Gates said. "After we saw that article, there was no question of where our life would focus."

"Our lifel" What the heck does Gates mean here—that he and Paul Allen were joined at the frontal lobe, sharing a single life, a single set of experiences? In those days, the answer was "yes." Drawn together by the idea of starting a pioneering soft ware company and each convinced that he couldn't succeed alone, they committed to sharing a single life—a life unlike that of most other PC pioneers because it was devoted as much to doing business as to doing technology.

Gates was a businessman from the start; otherwise, why would he have been worried about being passed by? There was plenty of room for high-level computer languages to be developed for the fledgling platforms, but there was only room for one first high-level language. Anyone could participate in a movement, but only those with the right timing could control it. Gates knew that the first language—the one resold by MITS, maker of the Altair—would become the standard for the whole industry. Those who seek to establish such de facto standards in any industry do so for business reasons.

"This is a very personal business, but success comes from appealing to groups," Gates says. "Money is made by setting d<_ facto standards."

The Altair was not much of a consumer product. It came typically as an unassembled $350 kit, clearly targeting only the electronic hobbyist market. There was no software for the machine, so, while it may have existed, it sure didn't compute. There wasn't even a keyboard. The only way of programming the computer at first was through entering strings of hexadecimal code by flicking a row of switches on the front panel. There was no display other than some blinking lights. The Altair was limited in its appeal to those who could solder (which eliminated most good programmers) and to those who could program in machine language (which eliminated most good solderers).

BASIC was generally recognized as the easiest programming language to learn in 1975. It automatically converted simple English-like commands to machine language, effectively removing the programming limitation and at least doubling the number of prospective Altair customers.

Since they didn't have an Altair 8800 computer (nobody did yet), Gates and Allen wrote a program that made a PDP-10 mini computer at the Harvard Computation Center simulate the Altair's Intel 8080 microprocessor. In six weeks, they wrote a version of the BASIC programming language that would run on the phantom Altair synthesized in the minicomputer. They hoped it would run on a real Altair equipped with at least 4096 bytes of random access memory. The first time they tried to run the language on a real microcomputer was when Paul Allen demonstrated the product to MITS founder Ed Roberts at the company's headquarters in Albuquerque. To their surprise and relief, it worked.

MITS BASIC, as it came to be called, gave substance to the microcomputer. Big computers ran BASIC. Real programs had been written in the language and were performing business, educational, and scientific functions in the real world. While the Altair was a computer of limited power, the fact that Allen and Gates were able to make a high-level language like BASIC run on the platform meant that potential users could imagine running these same sorts of applications now on a desktop rather than on a mainframe.

MITS BASIC was dramatic in its memory efficiency and made the bold move of adding commands that allowed programmers to control the computer memory directly. MITS BASIC wasn't perfect. The authors of the original BASIC, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, both of Dartmouth College, were concerned that Gates and Allen's version deviated from the language they had designed and placed into the public domain a decade before. Kemeny and Kurtz might have been unimpressed, but the hobbyist world was euphoric.

I've got to point out here that for many years Kemeny was president of Dartmouth, a school that didn't accept me when I was applying to colleges. Later, toward the end of the Age of Jimmy Carter, I found myself working for Kemeny, who was then head of the presidential commission investigating the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. One day I told him how Dartmouth had rejected me, and he said, "College admissions are never per fect, though in your case I'm sure we did the right thing." After that I felt a certain affection for Bill Gates.

Gates dropped out of Harvard, Allen left his programming job at Honeywell, and both moved to New Mexico to be close to their customer, in the best Tom Peters style. Hobbyists don't move across country to maintain business relationships, but businessmen do. They camped out in the Sundowner Motel on Route 66 in a neighborhood noted for all-night coffee shops, hookers, and drug dealers.

Gates and Allen did not limit their interest to MITS. They wrote versions of BASIC for other microcomputers as they came to market, leveraging their core technology. The two eventually had a falling out with Ed Roberts of MITS, who claimed that he owned MITS BASIC and its derivatives; they fought and won, something that hackers rarely bothered to do. Capitalists to the bone, they railed against software piracy before it even had a name, writing whining letters to early PC publications. Gates and Allen started Microsoft with a stated mission of putting "a computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software." Although it seemed ludicrous at the time, they meant it.

While Allen and Gates deliberately went about creating an industry and then controlling it, they were important exceptions to the general trend of PC entrepreneurism. Most of their eventual competitors were people who managed to be in just the right place at the right time and more or less fell into business. These people were mainly enthusiasts who at first developed computer languages and operating systems for their own use. It was worth the effort if only one person—the developer himself—used their product. Often they couldn't even imagine why anyone else would be interested.

Gary Kildall, for example, invented the first microcomputer operating system because he was tired of driving to work. In the early 1970s, Kildall taught computer science at the Naval Post graduate School in Monterey, California, where his specialty was compiler design. Compilers are software tools that take entire pro grams written in a high-level language like FORTRAN or Pascal and translate them into assembly language, which can be read directly by the computer. High-level languages are easier to learn than Assembler, so compilers allowed programs to be completed faster and with more features, although the final code was usually longer than if the program had been written directly in the internal language of the microprocessor. Compilers translate, or com pile, large sections of code into Assembler at one time, as opposed to interpreters, which translate commands one at a time.

By 1974, Intel had added the 8008 and 8080 to its family of microprocessors and had hired Gary Kildall as a consultant to write software to emulate the 8080 on a DEC time-sharing system, much as Gates and Allen would shortly do at Harvard. Since there were no microcomputers yet, Intel realized that the best way for companies to develop software for microprocessor-based devices was by using such an emulator on a larger system. Kildall's job was to write the emulator, called Interp/80, followed by a high-level language called PL/M, which was planned as a microcomputer equivalent of the XPL language developed for mainframe computers at Stanford University. Nothing so mundane (and useful by mere mortals) as BASIC for Gary Kildall, who had a Ph.D. in compiler design.

What bothered Kildall was not the difficulty of writing the software but the tedium of driving the fifty miles from his home in Pacific Grove across the Santa Cruz mountains to use the Intel minicomputer in Silicon Valley, He could have used a remote teletype terminal at home, but the terminal was incredibly slow for inputting thousands of lines of data over a phone line; driving was faster.

Or he could develop software directly on the 8080 processor, bypassing the time-sharing system completely. Not only could he avoid the long drive, but developing directly on the microprocessor would also bypass any errors in the minicomputer 8080 emulator. The only problem was that the 8080 microcomputer Gary Kildall wanted to take home didn't exist.

What did exist was the Intellec-8, an Intel product that could be used (sort of) to program an 8080 processor. The Intellec-8 had a microprocessor, some memory, and a port for attaching a Teletype 33 terminal. There was no software and no method for storing data and programs outside of main memory.

The primary difference between the Intellec-8 and a micro-computer was external data storage and the software to control it. IBM had invented a new device, called a floppy disk, to replace punched cards for its minicomputers. The disks themselves could be removed from the drive mechanism, were eight inches in diameter, and held the equivalent of thousands of pages of data. Priced at around $500, the floppy disk drive was perfect for Kildall's external storage device. Kildall, who didn't have $500, convinced Shugart Associates, a floppy disk drive maker, to give him a worn-out floppy drive used in its 10,000-hour torture test. While his friend John Torode invented a controller to link the Intellec-8 and the floppy disk drive, Kildall used the 8080 emulator on the Intel time-sharing system to develop his operating system, called CP/M, or Control Program/Monitor.

If a computer acquires a personality, it does so from its operating system. Users interact with the operating system, which interacts with the computer. The operating system controls the flow of data between a computer and its long-term storage sys tem. It also controls access to system memory and keeps those bits of data that are thrashing around the microprocessor from thrashing into each other. Operating systems usually store data in files, which have individual names and characteristics and can be called up as a program or the user requires them. Gary Kildall developed CP/M on a DEC PDP-10 minicomputer running the TOPS-10 operating system. Not surprisingly, most CP/M commands and file naming conventions look and op erate like their TOPS-10-counterparts. It wasn't pretty, but it did the job.

By the time he'd finished writing the operating system, Intel didn't want CP/M and had even lost interest in Kildall's PL/M language. The only customers for CP/M in 1975 were a maker of intelligent terminals and Lawrence Livermore Labs, which used CP/M to monitor programs on its Octopus network.

In 1976, Kildall was approached by Imsai, the second personal computer company with a stupid name. Imsai manufactured an early 8080-based microcomputer that competed with the Altair. In typical early microcomputer company fashion, Imsai had sold floppy disk drives to many of its customers, promising to send along an operating system eventually. With each of them now holding at least $1,000 worth of hardware that was only gathering dust, the customers wanted their operating system, and CP/M was the only operating system for Intel-based computers that was actually available.

By the time Imsai came along, Kildall and Torode had adapted CP/M to four different floppy disk controllers. There were probably 100 little companies talking about doing 8080- based computers, and neither man wanted to invest the endless hours of tedious coding required to adapt CP/M to each of these new platforms. So they split the parts of CP/M that interfaced with each new controller into a separate computer code module, called the Basic Input/Output System, or BIOS. With all the hard ware-dependent parts of CP/M concentrated in the BIOS, it be came a relatively easy job to adapt the operating system to many different Intel-based microcomputers by modifying just the BIOS. With his CP/M and invention of the BIOS, Gary Kildall defined the microcomputer. Peek into any personal computer to day, and you'll find a general-purpose operating system adapted to specific hardware through the use of a BIOS, which is now a specialized type of memory chip.

In the six years after Imsai offered the first CP/M computer, more than 500,000 CP/M computers were sold by dozens of makers. Programmers began to write CP/M applications, relying on the operating system's features to control the keyboard, screen, and data storage. This base of applications turned CP/M into a de facto standard among microcomputer operating systems, guaranteeing its long-term success. Kildall started a company called Intergalactic Digital Research (later, just Digital Research) to sell the software in volume to computer makers and direct to users for $70 per copy. He made millions of dollars, essentially without trying.

Before he knew it, Gary Kildall had plenty of money, fast cars, a couple of airplanes, and a business that made increasing demands on his time. His success, while not unwelcome, was unexpected, which also meant that it was unplanned for. Success brings with it a whole new set of problems, as Gary Kildall discovered. You can plan for failure, but how do you plan for success?

Every entrepreneur has an objective, which, once achieved, leads to a crisis. In Gary Kildall's case, the objective—just to write CP/M, not even to sell it—was very low, so the crisis came quickly. He was a code god, a programmer who literally saw lines of code fully formed in his mind and then committed them effortlessly to the keyboard in much the same way that Mozart wrote music. He was one with the machine; what did' he need with seventy employees?

"Gary didn't give a shit about the business. He was more interested in getting laid," said Gordon Eubanks, a former student of Kildall who led development of computer languages at Digital Research. "So much went so well for so long that he couldn't imagine it would change. When it did—when change was forced upon him—Gary didn't know how to handle it."

"Gary and Dorothy [Kildall's wife and a Digital Research vice-president] had arrogance and cockiness but no passion for products. No one wanted to make the products great. Dan Bricklin [another PC software pioneer—read on] sent a document saying what should be fixed in CP/M, but it was ignored. Then I urged Gary to do a BASIC language to bundle with CP/M, but when we finally got him to do a language, he insisted on PL/i —a virtually unmarketable language."

Digital Research was slow in developing a language business to go with its operating systems. It was also slow in updating its core operating system and extending it into the new world of 16-bit microprocessors that came along after 1980. The company in those days was run like a little kingdom, ruled by Gary and Dorothy Kildall.

"In one board meeting," recalled a former Digital Research executive, "we were talking about whether to grant stock options to a woman employee. Dorothy said, 'No, she doesn't de serve options—she's not professional enough; her kids visit her at work after 5:00 p.m.' Two minutes later, Christy Kildall, their daughter, burst into the boardroom and dragged Gary off with her to the stable to ride horses, ending the meeting. Oh yeah, Dorothy knew about professionalism."

"Let's say for a minute that Eubanks was correct, and Gary Kildall didn't give a shit about the business. Who said that he had to? CP/M was his invention; Digital Research was his company. The fact that it succeeded beyond anyone's expectations did not make those earlier expectations invalid. Gary Kildall's ambition was limited, something that is not supposed to be a factor in American business. If you hope for a thousand and get a million, you are still expected to want more, but he didn't.

It's easy for authors of business books to get rankled by characters like Gary Kildall who don't take good care of the empires they have built. But in fact, there are no absolute rules of behavior for companies like Digital Research. The business world is, like computers, created entirely by people. God didn't come down and say there will be a corporation and it will have a board of directors. We made that up. Gary Kildall made up Digital Research.

Eubanks, who came to Digital Research after a naval career spent aboard submarines, hated Kildall's apparent lack of discipline, not understanding that it was just a different kind of discipline. Kildall was into programming, not business. "Programming is very much a religious experience for a lot of people," Kildall explained. "If you talk about programming to a group of programmers who use the same language, they can become almost evangelistic about the language. They form a tight-knit community, hold to certain beliefs, and follow certain rules in their programming. It's like a church with a program ming language for a bible."

Gary Kildall's bible said that writing a BASIC compiler to go with CP/M might be a shrewd business move, but it would be a step backward technically; Kildall wanted to break new ground, and a BASIC had already been done by Microsoft. "The unstated rule around Digital Research was that Microsoft did languages, while we did operating systems," Eubanks explained. "It was never stated emphatically, but I always thought that Gary assumed he had an agreement with Bill Gates about this separation and that as long as we didn't compete with Microsoft, they wouldn't compete with us."

Sure.

The Altair 8800 may have been the first microcomputer, but it was not a commercial success. The problem was that assembly took from forty to an infinite number of hours, depending on the hobbyist's mechanical ability. When the kit was done, the micro computer either worked or didn't. If it worked, the owner had a programmable computer with a BASIC interpreter, ready to run any software he felt like writing.

The first microcomputer that was a major commercial success was the Apple II. It succeeded because it was the first micro computer that looked like a consumer electronic product. You could buy the Apple from a dealer who would fix it if it broke and would give you at least a little help in learning to operate the beast. The Apple II had a floppy disk drive for data storage, did not require a separate Teletype or video terminal, and offered color graphics in addition to text. Most important, you could buy software written by others that would run on the Apple and with which a novice could do real work.

The Apple II still defines what a low-end computer is like. Twenty-third century archaeologists excavating some ancient ComputerLand stockroom will see no significant functional difference between an Apple II of 1978 and an IBM PS/2 of 1992. Both have processor, memory, storage, and video graphics. Sure, the PS/2 has a faster processor, more memory and storage, and higher-resolution graphics, but that only matters to us today. By the twenty-third century, both machines will seem equally primitive.

The Apple II was guided by three spirits. Steve Wozniak invented the earlier Apple I to show it off to his friends in the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve Jobs was Wozniak's younger sidekick who came up with the idea of building computers for sale and generally nagged Woz and others until the Apple II was working to his satisfaction. Mike Markkula was the semiretired Intel veteran (and one of Noyce's boys) who brought the money and status required for the other two to be taken at all seriously.

Wozniak made the Apple II a simple machine that used clever hardware tricks to get good performance at a smallish price (at least to produce—the retail price of a fully outfitted Apple II was around $3,000). He found a way to allow the micro processor and the video display to share the same memory. His floppy disk controller, developed during a two-week period in December 1977, used less than a quarter the number of integrated circuits required by other controllers at the time. The Apple's floppy disk controller made it clearly superior to machines appearing about the same time from Commodore and Radio Shack. More so than probably any other microcomputer, the Apple II was the invention of a single person; even Apple's original BASIC interpreter, which was always available in read only memory, had been written by Woz.

Woz made the Apple II a color machine to prove that he could do it and so he could use the computer to play a color version of Breakout, a video game that he and Jobs had designed for Atari. Markkula, whose main contributions at Intel had been in finance, pushed development of the floppy disk drive so the computer could be used to run accounting programs and store resulting financial data for small business owners. Each man saw the Apple II as a new way of fulfilling an established need— to replace a video game for Woz and a mainframe for Markkula. This followed the trend that new media tend to imitate old media.

Radio began as vaudeville over the air, while early television was radio with pictures. For most users (though not for Woz) the microcomputer was a small mainframe, which explained why Apple's first application for the machine was an accounting pack age and the first application supplied by a third-party developer was a database—both perfect products for a mainframe substitute. But the Apple II wasn't a very good mainframe replacement. The fact is that new inventions often have to find uses of their own in order to find commercial success, and this was true for the Apple II, which became successful strictly as a spread sheet machine, a function that none of its inventors visualized.

At $3,000 for a fully configured system, the Apple II did not have a big future as a home machine. Old-timers like to reminisce about the early days of Apple when the company's computers were affordable, but the truth is that they never were. The Apple II found its eventual home in business, answering the prayers of all those middle managers who had not been able to gain access to the company's mainframe or who were tired of waiting the six weeks it took for the computer department to prepare a report, dragging the answers to simple business questions from corporate data. Instead, they quickly learned to use a spreadsheet program called VisiCalc, which was available at first only on the Apple II.

VisiCalc was a compelling application—an application so important that it, alone justified the computer purchase. Such an application was the last element required to turn the microcomputer from a hobbyist's toy into a business machine. No matter how powerful and brilliantly designed, no computer can be successful without a compelling application. To the people who bought them, mainframes were really inventory machines or ac counting machines, and minicomputers were office automation machines. The Apple II was a VisiCalc machine.

VisiCalc was a whole new thing, an application that had not appeared before on some other platform. There were no mini computer or mainframe spreadsheet programs that could be downsized to run on a microcomputer. The microcomputer and the spreadsheet came along at the same time. They were made for each other.

VisiCalc came about because its inventor, Dan Bricklin, went to business school. And Bricklin went to business school because he thought that his career as a programmer was about to end; it was becoming so easy to write programs that Bricklin was convinced there would eventually be no need for programmers at all, and he would be out of a job. So in the fall of 1977, 26 years old and worried about being washed up, he entered the Harvard Business School looking toward a new career.

At Harvard, Bricklin had an advantage over other students. He could whip up BASIC programs on the Harvard time-sharing system that would perform financial calculations. The problem with Bricklin's programs was that they had to be written and rewritten for each new problem. He began to look for a more general way of doing these calculations in a format that would be flexible.

What Bricklin really wanted was not a microcomputer program at all but a specialized piece of hardware—a kind of very advanced calculator with a heads-up display similar to the weapons system controls on an F-14 fighter. Like Luke Skywalker jumping into the turret of the Millennium Falcon, Bricklin saw himself blasting out financials, locking onto profit and loss numbers that would appear suspended in space before him. It was to be a business tool cum video game, a Saturday Night Special for M.B.A.s, only the hardware technology didn't exist in those days to make it happen.

Back in the semi-real world of the Harvard Business School, Bricklin's production professor described large blackboards that were used in some companies for production planning. These blackboards, often so long that they spanned several rooms, were segmented in a matrix of rows and columns. The production planners would fill each space with chalk scribbles relating to the time, materials, manpower, and money needed to manufacture a product. Each cell on the blackboard was located in both a column and a row, so each had a two-dimensional address. Some cells were related to others, so if the number of workers listed in cell C-3 was increased, it meant that the amount of total wages in cell D-5 had to be increased proportionally, as did the total number of items produced, listed in cell F-7. Changing the value in one cell required the recalculation of values in all other linked cells, which took a lot of erasing and a lot of recalculating and left the planners constantly worried that they had overlooked recalculating a linked value, making their overall conclusions incorrect.

Given that Bricklin's Luke Skywalker approach was out of the question, the blackboard metaphor made a good structure for Bricklin's financial calculator, with a video screen replacing the physical blackboard. Once data and formulas were introduced by the user into each cell, changing one variable would automatically cause all the other cells to be recalculated and changed too. No linked cells could be forgotten. The video screen would show a window on a spreadsheet that was actually held in computer memory. The virtual spreadsheet inside the box could be almost any size, putting on a desk what had once taken whole rooms filled with blackboards. Once the spreadsheet was set up, answer ing a what-if question like "How much more money will we make if we raise the price of each widget by a dime?" would take only seconds.

His production professor loved the idea, as did Bricklin's ac counting professor. Bricklin's finance professor, who had others to do his computing for him, said there were already financial analysis programs running on mainframes, so the world did not need Dan Bricklin's little program. Only the world did need Dan Bricklin's little program, which still didn't have a name. It's not surprising that VisiCalc grew out of a business school experience because it was the business schools that were produc ing most of the future VisiCalc users. They were the thousands of M.B.A.s who were coming into the workplace trained in analytical business techniques and, even more important, in typing. They had the skills and the motivation but usually not the access to their company computer. They were the first generation of businesspeople who could do it all by themselves, given the proper tools.

Bricklin cobbled up a demonstration version of his idea over a weekend. It was written in BASIC, was slow, and had only enough rows and columns to fill a single screen, but it demonstrated many of the basic functions of the spreadsheet. For one thing, it just sat there. This is the genius of the spreadsheet; it's event driven. Unless the user changes a cell, nothing happens. This may not seem like much, but being event driven makes a spreadsheet totally responsive to the user; it puts the user in charge in a way that most other programs did not. VisiCalc was a spreadsheet language, and what the users were doing was rudimentary programming, without the anxiety of knowing that's what it was.

By the time Bricklin had his demonstration program running, it was early 1978 and the mass market for microcomputers, such as it was, was being vied for by the Apple II, Commodore PET, and the Radio Shack TRS-80. Since he had no experience with micros, and so no preference for any particular machine, Bricklin and Bob Frankston, his old friend from MIT and new partner, developed VisiCalc for the Apple II, strictly because that was the computer their would-be publisher loaned them in the fall of 1978. No technical merit was involved in the decision.

Dan Fylstra was the publisher. He had graduated from Harvard Business School a year or two before and was trying to make a living selling microcomputer chess programs from his home. Fylstra's Personal Software was the archetypal microcomputer application software company. Bill Gates at Microsoft and Gary Kildall at Digital Research were specializing in operating systems and languages, products that were lumped together under the label of systems software, and were mainly sold to hardware manufacturers rather than directly to users. But Fylstra was sell ing applications direct to retailers and end users, often one pro gram at a time. With no clear example to follow, he had to make most of the mistakes himself, and did.

Since there was no obvious success story to emulate, no re tail software company that had already stumbled across the rules for making money, Fylstra dusted off his Harvard case study technique and looked for similar industries whose rules could be adapted to the microcomputer software biz. About the closest example he could find was book publishing, where the author accepts responsibility for designing and implementing the product, and the publisher is responsible for manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and sales. Transferred to the microcomputer arena, this meant that Software Arts, the company Bricklin and Frankston formed, would develop VisiCalc and its subsequent versions, while Personal Software, Fylstra's company, would copy the floppy disks, print the manuals, place ads in computer publications, and distribute the product to retailers and the pub lic. Software Arts would receive a royalty of 37.5 percent on copies of VisiCalc sold at retail and 50 percent for copies sold wholesale. "The numbers seemed fair at the time," Fylstra said. Bricklin was still in school, so he and Frankston divided their efforts in a way that would become a standard for micro computer programming projects. Bricklin designed the program, while Frankston wrote the actual code. Bricklin would say, "This is the way the program is supposed to look, these are the features, and this is the way it should function," but the actual de sign of the internal program was left up to Bob Frankston, who had been writing software since 1963 and was clearly up to the task. Frankston added a few features on his own, including one called "lookup," which could extract values from a table, so he could use VisiCalc to do his taxes.

Bob Frankston is a gentle man and a brilliant programmer who lives in a world that is just slightly out of sync with the world in which you and I live. (Okay, so it's out of sync with the world in which you live.) When I met him, Frankston was chief scientist at Lotus Development, the people who gave us the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. In a personal computer hardware or software company, being named chief scientist means that the boss doesn't know what to do with you. Chief scientists don't generally have to do anything; they're just smart people whom the company doesn't want to lose to a competitor. So they get a title and an office and are obliged to represent the glorious past at all company functions. At Apple Computer, they call them Apple Fellows, because you can't have more than one chief scientist.

Bob Frankston, a modified nerd (he combined the requisite flannel shirt with a full beard), seemed not to notice that his role of chief scientist was a sham, because to him it wasn't; it was the perfect opportunity to look inward and think deep thoughts without regard to their marketability.

"Why are you doing this as a book?" Frankston asked me over breakfast one morning in Newton, Massachusetts. By "this," he meant the book you have in your hands right now, the major literary work of my career and, I hope, the basis of an important American fortune. "Why not do it as a hypertext file that people could just browse through on their computers?" I will not be browsed through. The essence of writing books is the author's right to tell the story in his own words and in the order he chooses. Hypertext, which allows an instant accounting of how many times the words Dynamic Random-Access Memory or fuck appear, completely eliminates what I perceive as my value-added, turns this exercise into something like the Yellow Pages, and totally eliminates the prospect that it will help fund my retirement.

"Oh," said Frankston, with eyebrows raised. "Okay." Meanwhile, back in 1979, Bricklin and Frankston developed the first version of VisiCalc on an Apple II emulator running on a minicomputer, just as Microsoft BASIC and CP/M had been written. Money was tight, so Frankston worked at night, when computer time was cheaper and when the time-sharing system responded faster because there were fewer users.

They thought that the whole job would take a month, but it took close to a year to finish. During this time, Fylstra was show ing prerelease versions of the product to the first few software retailers and to computer companies like Apple and Atari. Atari was interested but did not yet have a computer to sell. Apple's reaction to the product was lukewarm.

VisiCalc hit the market in October 1979, selling for $100. The first 100 copies went to Marv Goldschmitt's computer store in Bedford, Massachusetts, where Dan Bricklin appeared regularly to give demonstrations to bewildered customers. Sales were slow. Nothing like this product had existed before, so it would be a mistake to blame the early microcomputer users for not realizing they were seeing the future when they stared at their first VisiCalc screen.

Nearly every software developer in those days believed that small businesspeople would be the main users of any financial products they'd develop. Markkula's beloved accounting system, for example, would be used by small retailers and manufacturers who could not afford access to a time-sharing system and preferred not to farm the job out to an accounting service. Bricklin's spreadsheet would be used by these same small businesspeople to prepare budgets and forecast business trends. Automation was supposed to come to the small business community through the microcomputer just as it had come to the large and medium businesses through mainframes and minicomputers. But it didn't work that way.

The problem with the small business market was that small businesses weren't, for the most part, very businesslike. Most small businesspeople didn't know what they were doing.

Accounting was clearly beyond them.

At the time, sales to hobbyists and would-be computer game players were topping out, and small businesses weren't buying.

Apple and most of its competitors were in real trouble. The personal computer revolution looked as if it might last only five /ears. But then VisiCalc sales began to kick in. Among the many customers who watched VisiCalc demos at Marv Goldschmitt's computer store were a few businesspeople— rare members of both the set of computer enthusiasts and the economic establishment. Many of these people had bought Apple lis, hoping to do real work until they attempted to come to terms with the computer's forty-column display and lack of lowercase letters. In VisiCalc, they found an application that did not care about lowercase letters, and since the program used a view through the screen on a larger, virtual spreadsheet, the forty column limit was less of one. For $100, they took a chance, carried the program home, then eventually took both the program and the computer it ran on with them to work. The true market for the Apple II turned out to be big business, and it was through the efforts of enthusiast employees, not Apple marketers, that the Apple II invaded industry.

"The beautiful thing about the spreadsheet was that customers in big business were really smart and understood the benefits right away," said Trip Hawkins, who was in charge of small business strategy at Apple. "I visited Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. The company had decided that Apple II technology wasn't suitable, but 1,000 Apple lis had somehow arrived in the corporate head quarters, bought with petty cash funds and popularized by the office intelligentsia."

Hawkins was among the first to realize that the spreadsheet was a new form of computer life and that VisiCalc—the only spreadsheet on the market and available at first only on the Apple II—would be Apple's tool for entering, maybe dominating, the microcomputer market for medium and large corporations. VisiCalc was a strategic asset and one that had to be tied upfast before Bricklin and Frankston moved it onto other platforms like the Radio Shack TRS-80.

"When I brought the first copies of VisiCalc into Apple, it was clear to me that this was an important application, vital to the success of the Apple II," Hawkins said. "We didn't want it to appear on the Radio Shack or on the IBM machine we knew was coming, so I took Dan Fylstra to lunch and talked about a buy out. The price we settled on would have been $1 million worth of Apple stock, which would have been worth much more later. But when I took the deal to Markkula for approval, he said, 'No, it's too expensive.'"

A million dollars was an important value point in the early microcomputer software business. Every programmer who bothered to think about money at all looked toward the time when he would sell out for a cool million. Apple could have used owner ship of the program to dominate business micro-computing for years. The deal would have been good, too, for Dan Fylstra, who so recently had been selling chess programs out of his apartment. Except that Dan Fylstra didn't own VisiCalc — Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston did. The deal came and went without the boys in Massachusetts even being told.