What are microplastics and what are scientists learning about these small particles? I'm Mia Quinn. On the next episode of Sustainably Speaking, I talk with Dr. Jean Hinkett, who's leading a center that studies microplastics at BASF about how she's approaching this issue with research and solutions in mind. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Techmeme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough.
Okay, no preamble needed, though I will give you some of the audio from yesterday to catch you up on where we're at. But really simply this is part 2 of Gary Kildall, the man who could have been Bill Gates. Bill Gates at this moment doesn't want to say no to IBM. If they ask him to jump, he will say how high. If they ask him to provide something that he doesn't have, in this case, an operating system, there's no way that Bill Gates is going to let them go away empty handed.
Bill Gates will be accommodating to IBM. He will help them find their operating system. Again, from the triumph of the nerd's documentary, here's how it all went down according to Steve Balmer and Jack Sam's. Sam's again was the head of the IBM delegation. They thought we had an operating system because we had this soft card product that had CPM on it.
They thought we could like some CPM for this new personal computer they told us they wanted to do and we said, well, no, we're not in that business. When we discovered we didn't have the heated in other rights to do that and that it was not, he said, but I think it's ready. I think Gary's got it ready to go. Well, no time like the President called up Gary. So Bill right there with them in the room called Gary Kildall, digital research said, Gary, I'm sending some guys down.
They're going to be on the phone. Treat them right. They're important guys. Here are some other quotes from Jack Sam's. This time from the book hard drive Bill Gates and the making of the Microsoft Empire. But I presume they were able to offer us a 16-bit version of the operating system, but we really didn't discover until the second or third meeting that that was not true because we weren't able at the first meeting to ask the sort of detailed questions we wanted to ask.
Bill told us if we wanted a 16-bit CPM, we would have to deal with Kildall. We said, oops, we had really only wanted to deal with one person, but now we had to talk to Kildall. I asked Bill Gates if he would make an appointment for us. Every version of this story has Bill Gates personally picking up the phone, calling Gary Kildall and telling him he's sending some business his way.
But remember, Gates has just signed this notorious confidentiality agreement, and so he can't reveal exactly who it is he's sending over. He can't reveal to Gary Kildall that it's IBM. So every recollection of this incident has Gates merely relating some version of, there's some very important customers coming to talk to you, treat them right. This is where the legend really begins.
Many of the people involved in these events have subsequently died, and others, in the fullness of time, probably have little interest or motivation in shedding light on what actually went down when IBM went to meet with Gary Kildall. And so a lot of the details that we're about to go into are frankly contradictory. This is a story that has become sort of the roshamon of the tech industry. What really happened depends on who you believe.
For example, for many years, IBM claimed that it never actually successfully met with Gary Kildall. In this version of events, IBM showed up at a restored Victorian house in Pacific Grove California and met with Gary Kildall's wife because Gary Kildall wasn't there. They tried to convince Dorothy Kildall to sign the infamous non-disclosure agreement. She refuses and so IBM leaves.
But contrary to this legend, we know that the Victorian house that IBM showed up at was actually the headquarters for digital research. It wasn't just some house. It contained the offices for digital researchers than dozens of employees. And Dorothy Kildall wasn't just some housewife standing in for her husband. She was the head of business operations for digital research. It would have been eminently logical for the IBM guys to have met with her that day.
After all, Dorothy Kildall was the one who had negotiated all the other deals with computer companies that digital research had landed over the years. In Dorothy Kildall's version, she does decline to sign the non-disclosure agreement at least at first.
But she maintained that she did so on the advice of Jerry Davis, who was digital researchers in house lawyer, Davis reportedly advised her, quote, Bill Gates signed that agreement because he had nothing to lose because he didn't have an operating system. IBM's Jack Sam's is steadfast in maintaining that it was this hiccup that held everything up. Quote, we tried to get past the point of signing this non-disclosure agreement so that we could talk about what we came down to talk about.
It was about three o'clock in the afternoon before they finally got around to the point of signing an agreement that said we had been there and they would not disclose it. I was completely frustrated. So in some recollections, the non-disclosure is never signed and IBM leaves. In other recollections, the non-disclosure is eventually signed, but IBM is already so frustrated that they leave. Both of these versions of events have one thing in common, of course. Gary Kildall isn't present.
And for many years, Jack Sam's swore he never actually met Gary Kildall that day, quote, not unless he was there pretending to be someone else. And until a few years ago, that's where the legend stood because we didn't have Gary Kildall's version of the day. But apparently, a few years before his death, Gary Kildall began to write a memoir. It has remained unpublished to this day.
But in 2004, the historian Harold Evans got access to the Kildall manuscript and he used it to write about this story in his book They Made America. All of the Gary Kildall quotes that we have used thus far in this episode have come from Harold Evans and his transcription of the Kildall manuscript. Thanks to Harold Evans, we finally have Gary Kildall's version of that day. And in Gary Kildall's version, yes, he was missing when IBM first showed up to meet with his wife.
And yes, the reason why he was missing is because he was outflying. But it's not exactly what you're thinking. The stories make it sound like I was doing loops or something. But I was outflying on business just like someone else would be driving a car. I knew the IBM people were coming. It was indeed common knowledge that Gary Kildall flew for business. Plenty of people had been flown around by Gary or had met Gary at airports in order to make deals.
Kildall was more than his hobby. It was Kildall's preferred way of getting around in those early days when the tech industry was scattered around the country and not concentrated in places like Silicon Valley and Seattle. Whether or not Kildall knew it was IBM who was showing up is maybe the reason why he wasn't there.
Remember when Bill Gates called him the terms of the nondisclosure, this troublesome document that this whole story hangs on meant that he couldn't tell Gary Kildall exactly who was coming. So perhaps Gary, or maybe even his wife, thought that this was just another routine meeting with a small PC maker coming to license CPM just as had happened dozens of times before. And the meeting had been scheduled on incredibly short notice.
According to various accounts, Bill Gates called Gary Kildall on a Wednesday and IBM showed up two days later on Friday. That is why, according to Kildall's manuscript, he was outflying that morning because he was making a delivery to an existing customer. He intended to show up after the meeting had gotten started and he trusted that his wife would be able to handle business until then just as she had always done.
And according to Kildall's manuscript, he definitely got to the meeting eventually. He definitely met with IBM that day. And what's more, Gary Kildall maintains that for him, the nondisclosure agreement was simply not an issue. My wife had some concerns before I arrived sure. If you sign this agreement, it says they can take any of your ideas and use them anyway they want. It's pretty scary. My wife had never seen anything like that before. I explained that these were not bad guys.
They just had to protect themselves from future suits. I had no problem with the nondisclosure agreement. Again, this version of events is flatly contradicted by Jack Sam's from IBM. So we spent the whole day in specific growth debating with them and with our attorneys and her attorneys and everybody else about whether or not she could even talk to us about talking to us. And we left.
But Kildall's version is corroborated by another digital research employee, Tom Rollander, who claims to have been present that day. Jerry and I were scheduled to go that morning up to meet with Bill Godbout, who is one of the early people in the industry building an S100 system and we were delivering him a CPM documentation. The Gary and I, as the story goes, were in fact flying.
We flew up to the Bay Area, up to Oakland Airport, delivered the software to Bill and flew back down and joined the IBM meeting. We were there for the meeting later in the afternoon. By that point in time, things had already gone a little bit wrong. IBM had come into the meeting. They had a, what I would call a unidirectional non-disclosure agreement. The idea was that digital research was to agree that they had never met IBM and the meeting hadn't occurred.
And yet everything that digital research disclosed to IBM was intended to be public domain. That was the way the agreement structured. A better paradise at number one on Apple's Fiction podcast charts at launch. Remember, I told you about a better paradise. It's a sci-fi thriller, audio drama from the writers of Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto.
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Go listen today and don't forget to follow a better paradise on your platform of choice to make sure you never miss an episode. This podcast is sponsored by the Washington Post. If you're a fan of the show, you're a fan of the reporting from the Washington Post because I quote from them all the time, as you know.
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That's 80% off their typical offer, so this is truly a steal. Once again, that's WashingtonPost.com backslash ride to subscribe for just 50 cents per week for your first year. According to Gary Kildall, the major hiccup that day was not about non-disclosure agreements, but about the terms that IBM was looking for. IBM wanted a flat licensing fee of $250,000 all in for CPM. But that was not how digital research did business.
That was not generally how the software industry did business at the time. Digital research usually got a per copy royalty payment when it signed a licensing agreement. Digital research had dozens of other pre-existing clients, dozens of other pre-existing contracts, and those contracts had per copy royalty arrangements within them.
What was more, it had most favored nation clauses in those pre-existing contracts with those pre-existing clients, which said that digital research had to give the same sort of licensing deal to everybody it did business with. In other words, if Gary Kildall did a flat fee deal with IBM, he risked angering his existing partners. He would open up digital research to dozens of lawsuits. He risked, in short, blowing up his entire business model.
He risked blowing up his entire, very lucrative business. You might be saying, hey Gary, it's not the whole damn thing to IBM. A strategy may have worked, but our entire customer base wanted a smooth transition into 16-bit machines. We'd have lost them in a heartbeat. But I countered with an ongoing $10 per copy royalty for CPM, as was paid by all other manufacturers.
According to Gary Kildall, IBM didn't leave empty-handed that day, but with an arrangement to continue talking at some later date. We broke from discussions, but nevertheless, handshaking in general agreement on making a deal. And there's more. Apparently, Gary and Dorothy Kildall were scheduled to leave that very weekend for a long planned vacation in the Caribbean.
And so the very next day, when they were boarding a flight to Miami, lo and behold, they found themselves on the same flight with some of the same IBM team that they had met with just the previous day. The IBM team was on their way back to the IBM PC skunkworks in Boca Raton, Florida. According to the Kildall version of events, on the plane ride down to Miami, discussion continues about a potential digital research IBM deal to provide CPM as the operating system for the IBM PC.
According to IBM, this chance meeting on the plane never happened. According to Gary Kildall, a week later, when he got back from vacation, he attempted to restart negotiations with IBM, but suddenly, IBM wasn't returning his calls. According to IBM's Jack Sam's, he did have phone calls with Gary Kildall, but decided that a deal couldn't be reached, mostly due to Gary Kildall's intransions. Quoting Jack Sam's, we tried very hard to get a commitment from Gary.
When we couldn't, I finally told him, look, we just can't go with you. We've got to have a schedule and a commitment. We can get one from Gates. End quote. Let's unpack that just a bit. If Jack Sam's is correct, that the deal with CPM fell through over commitment issues, that probably refers to a very interesting technical reason that IBM probably couldn't go forward with Gary Kildall.
It turned out that IBM had committed to making its PC using Intel's next generation of chips, which were all 16-bit, as opposed to the 8-bit chips that CPM had worked with so well over the years. Digital research was, at the time, working hard on writing a 16-bit version of CPM for these new chips, but they were very much behind schedule. So far behind schedule, in fact, that others in the industry were getting impatient and upset.
IBM, more than anyone else, couldn't afford to wait for this next version of CPM to arrive. So when Jack Sam speaks of scheduling and commitment, he might be referring to the fact that IBM's crash development schedule required an operating system yesterday. It's conceivable that there was simply no way for Gary Kildall to complete work on the new version of CPM in time for IBM's scheduled PC launch.
But also, we can intuit from that language that working with IBM would have required digital research to literally drop everything else it was doing and focus all of its energies on the IBM project. As we've seen, this is possibly something that Gary Kildall was constitutionally not interested in doing. But the other really interesting thing about Jack Sam's wording is when he says at the end, quote, we can get one from Gates.
Because if there's one thing we know historically, it's that Microsoft did end up providing an operating system for the IBM PC. This of course, after originally telling IBM that it didn't have one. Time after the meeting in Pacific Grove, IBM ended up back at Microsoft, perhaps to discuss the rollout of the software languages, or perhaps merely to report that it had a brick wall with Kildall.
And in one of these discussions, Bill Gates had to have told IBM that, you know what, we can provide you with an operating system after all. How did this happen? Well, remember, a lot of people in the PC industry were waiting for a 16-bit version of CPM to arrive. The new 16-bit chips were obviously more powerful, faster, and so people naturally wanted to create computers to run with these chips.
Back in Seattle, one of the people in the PC industry who was tired of waiting on Gary Kildall to update CPM was Tim Patterson. Patterson worked at Seattle Computer Products. Again, one of the dozens of tiny personal computer companies that had sprung up relying on CPM as their operating systems. Seattle Computer Products wanted to sell computers based on 16-bit chips.
And so, earlier in 1980, Tim Patterson had, in his spare time, coded together an operating system that did all the things CPM could do, but which also worked on 16-bit machines. He called it the Quick and Dirty Operating System, or QDoS. Here is Tim Patterson in March 1983, explaining his motivation. Quote, I was waiting for digital to come out with CPM 86. I thought they would have it real soon. If they had beat me, I wouldn't even have taken the trouble.
I had always wanted to write my own operating system. I've always hated CPM, and I thought I could do it a lot better. Quote. And here is Patterson describing how he did it, how he created QDoS, again, from the triumph of the nerd's documentary. So I took a CPM manual that I'd gotten from the retail computer store, $5.76 or something. And use that as the basis for the application programming interface, the API for my operating system.
And so using these ideas that came from different places, I started in April, and it was about half time for four months before I had my first working version. Thanks to Tim Patterson, serendipitously, here is QDoS. This ready-made operating system that could run everything just like CPM, but crucially, do so on 16-bit processors. This would solve IBM's operating system problem. And remember, Bill Gates was all about solving all of IBM's problems.
Here's Bill Gates and Steve Bomber themselves, again, from Triumph of the Nerds. And we knew it was essential if somebody didn't do it, the project was going to fall apart. So we just got carried away and said, look, we can't afford to lose the language business. That was the initial thought. We can't afford to have IBM not go forward. This is the most exciting thing that's going to happen in PCs.
And we are already out on the limb because we had licensed them not only basic, but forward trans, cobalt, assembler, typing to to adventure. And basically every product the company had, we had committed to do for IBM in a very short time frame. And so at some point, after those initial meetings with IBM, Microsoft went out and purchased QDoS from Seattle Computer Products, reportedly for $75,000. Microsoft didn't disclose to Seattle Computer Products why it suddenly wanted an operating system.
It didn't have to. Once again, Microsoft could cite that infamous IBM confidentiality agreement. QDoS, now owned by Microsoft, was renamed PCDoS and was licensed by Microsoft to IBM as a part of the overall software deal that the two companies signed in November of 1980. Microsoft signed on to the brutal crash course timeline that IBM demanded and submitted to IBM's continued obsession with secrecy.
The details of which included padlocked soundproof safe rooms for software development, prototype machines handcuffed to desks, and the shredding of all documents. Shredding followed by burning. And the rest, as they say, is history. The IBM PC, with GOS as its operating system, came out on August 12, 1981. And just as Bill Gates had foreseen, the halo of Goodwill surrounding the IBM brand made the IBM PC into the most trusted and popular personal computer of the early 1980s.
Then thanks to the open architecture and off the shelf design of the PC, meant that other computer companies like Compact could come in and create clone PCs, the PC platform mutated and became the industry standard. And once this happened, once the PC platform became the standard and became a commodity, the only thing that truly mattered to keep the platform running was DOS.
And Microsoft found itself holding the most valuable piece of the most valuable technology platform the world had ever seen. IBM and the other PC manufacturers would eventually spend the better part of the 1980s, bitterly competing with each other on price, specs, and brand, fighting over small slivers of slowly eroding profit margins, while the PC hardware itself became a commodity.
In the background was Microsoft, happily watching its urs-while partners duke it out, supplying the ammunition to all sides and quietly pocketing the license fee for DOS as the price for doing so. As Bill Gates once famously explained to Wall Street Journal reporter David Bank, his fundamental insight when he founded Microsoft all those years ago was that as hardware got cheap, software got valuable. Software Gates, and Twitter, was the bottleneck.
Computer software would always be in shortage because what people wanted to do with computers was always increasing. Microsoft became the most powerful company in technology by taking over the technology industry from the inside out, and Bill Gates became the richest man in the world by understanding decades before Mark Andreessen would coin the phrase that software would eat the world. During design sprints, many tools like JIRA can be restrictive in the way they organize information.
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And when he did find out, late in 1981, when CPM, like other software developers, got their hands on the first IBM PCs in order to develop for them, let's just say that he was no longer non-plussed. According to Kildall, the thing that surprised him was not so much the Microsoft copyright on the operating system, as it was the operating system itself. To Kildall, PCDOS looked extremely similar to CPM.
The first 26 function calls of the API in Gates PCDOS are identical to and taken directly from the CPM proprietary documents. Kildall claimed that there were structural and functional similarities in PCDOS that made him believe it, or QDOS at least, which PCDOS had been based on, was at best a clone of his original CPM. Gary Kildall was famous for leaving Easter eggs in his software as a way of claiming ownership.
And to Kildall's mind, there were plenty of coding idiosyncrasies that, at least to him, were very telling. Ask Bill Gates why the string in MSDOS function 9 is terminated by a dollar sign. Ask him, because he can't answer. Only I know that.
If at first, it didn't upset Gary Kildall that he had missed out on providing the operating system for the PC, what apparently really galled him was that now he believed he had missed out on the operating system deal to a direct clone of his original operating system that IBM had wanted to buy in the first place. Shedding his traditional good nature for the first time, Kildall apparently called up Tim Patterson and accused him of ripping off CPM.
Patterson reportedly said to him, quote, I told him I didn't copy anything. I just took his printed documentation and did something that did the same thing. That's not by any stretch violating any kind of intellectual property laws. Making the recipe in the book does not violate the copyright on the recipe. Not modified by this, Gary Kildall's next phone call was apparently to IBM, who he immediately threatened to sue. IBM dispatched lawyers to digital research headquarters right away.
And again, from the unpublished memoir, I showed the IBM attorney definitive evidence that PC DOS was a clone of CPM and immediately threatened to lawsuit for copyright infringement. The IBM attorney compared the API interface and I can clearly say that he fairly blanched of the comparison. I stated that he was not aware of any similarity. I told him that he should take note and become aware of the earliest opportunity or he could face a major lawsuit.
Kildall's threat to sue came a couple weeks before the debut of the IBM PC. IBM knew that it had to avoid a lawsuit coming right on the eve of its biggest product launch. And so it was eager to cut a deal with Gary Kildall, a deal that would keep him at least happy enough not to sue before the PC launch. All Gary Kildall really wanted was to write the wrong of the missed opportunity to provide an operating system to IBM.
In the meantime, CPM 86, the 16-bit version of CPM that had been long-published, was finally available. So he merely asked IBM to make CPM 86 available at the time of the PC launch. And IBM agreed. CPM 86 would go on sale alongside PC DOS, as well as a third lesser known operating system, as soon as the IBM PCs hit store shelves. Kildall was confident that he would finally get vindication simply by letting the market decide which operating system was better. But there was just one problem.
When the IBM PC came out, PC DOS was priced at $40 a copy, while CPM 86 was priced at $240 a copy. The market would decide, all right, but it seemed to an increasingly infuriated Gary Kildall that someone had decided to put their thumb on the scales. Here again is Tom Rollender, the digital research employee, remembering the first time that he and Kildall saw the price disparity at retail.
Quote, it was just as if I were to reach across the table right now and give you a slap on the face, something completely off the wall. Looking at the price and knowing you had been completely screwed. At this point, Gary Kildall believes that the IBM PC has an operating system that is at best a clone of his intellectual property. At the same time, he feels like that same intellectual property can't compete with the PC operating system because he believes it's being priced unfairly.
It would seem logical to us now that Gary Kildall would sue IBM or Microsoft or both. He never did. This is something that has confused commentators, journalists, and historians for years. Why didn't Gary Kildall and digital research sue? There's no real way to know beyond speculation, so we're going to resort to speculating. On the one hand, many people would say that there's a bit of revisionist history going on if you're shouting for Gary Kildall to sue Bill Gates.
We live in a world where lawsuits over intellectual property and software copyright are common, just another cost of doing business. But that wasn't the lay of the land in the early 1980s. The fact is, at the time, copyright and IP law for software was brand new. There wasn't even until 1980 that software was included in the definition of copyright in legislation by Congress. At the time, no one had ever filed a lawsuit over computer software infringement.
In a 2004 article in Business Week that investigated this whole story, Jerry Davis, that original digital research lawyer who either was or was not present with Dorothy Kildall at that fateful IBM meeting all those years ago, as saying that, quote, in today's world, you could take it to court and get an infringement, end quote. But not in 1981. On the other hand, I would come back to what we know about Gary Kildall, what so many of his friends and coworkers and family members told us about him.
He simply wasn't into the business side of the software business. And if he was ambivalent about such matters to begin with, it's not hard to imagine that these run-ins with Microsoft and IBM only furthered his distaste for deal-making and dollars and cents. In short, I'm speculating that maybe Gary Kildall just wasn't the suing sort. He didn't have the stomach for that sort of thing or at least the patience because obviously a lawsuit like this would probably drag on for decades.
And as further evidence in support of my theory that this whole sorted incident turned Gary Kildall off to business, I point to the fact that soon after in 1981, when digital research took its first major round of venture capital investment, Gary Kildall used that as an opportunity to step down as CEO of digital research. He would go on to other projects, other companies even, which will discuss in a bit.
But the bottom line is that once the management of digital research was out of his hands, and in the hands of a new board of directors, that board of directors seemed to have no interest in pursuing a lawsuit either. At the time, it probably didn't seem like it mattered. By the end of 1982, digital research employed 500 people and its revenue skyrocketed from 6 million in 1981 to 44 million in 1983.
This growth was powered by the innovative products that were Gary Kildall and also Tom Rollender's legacy at digital research. Older listeners might remember such operating systems as CPM 86, of course, but also MPM and even concurrent DOS. These were innovative products that would pave the way to innovative features such as multitasking, multi-programming and multi-access. It's hard to imagine now that DOS and other operating systems at the time could only load one application at a time.
You couldn't even, say, cut and paste between a spreadsheet and a word processing program because you couldn't run a spreadsheet and a word processor simultaneously. This ability to multitask led to digital research having great success, especially overseas, where Microsoft and IBM had less cloud. Digital research landed lucrative contracts with major European corporations like Siemens, and other digital research products were just as forward-thinking.
By 1984, products such as concurrent DOS and Starlink allowed users to set up rudimentary wide-area networks. And in a delicious bit of irony, digital research would even go on to eventually release a DOS clone called DRDOS, which was the only serious challenge to the DOS Windows operating system that Microsoft ever faced from cloners. But in the broad scope of history, of course, none of that really mattered.
Because as the IBM PC became the dominant computing model and DOS became the dominant operating system, there was little interest in the technology industry for alternatives, no matter how technologically superior. But as for Gary Kildall, he was already a very rich man, of course. And he became even more so when Novel bought digital research for around $100 million in 1991.
Kildall continued to accumulate those toys that he loved, like a $3 million-lear jet, or fast cars, a ranch in Texas, a mansion with ocean views and pebble beach. And he became an avid philanthropist with a special interest in supporting causes like pediatric aids. But somehow, even after he left the day-to-day of digital research and pursued other products and projects, that missed opportunity with IBM seemed to haunt Gary Kildall.
It didn't help that everywhere he turned, the ghosts of Bill Gates seemed to be there, even in these new projects. As an example, in the early 1980s, Gary Kildall became obsessed with multimedia technology like video disks and the laser disk. Technology that would have eventually become CD-ROMs and DVDs. In 1984, again with Tom Rolander, he launched a new company called Knowledge Set to commercialize CD-ROM technologies.
One of the first products Knowledge Set produced was a CD-ROM version of Growlures in Cyclopedia. One day in 1985, seemingly out of the blue, Knowledge Set received a letter from Bill Gates saying that Microsoft was interested in acquiring cutting-edge CD-ROM companies. Did Knowledge Set be interested in selling? Apparently Gates had no idea that Gary Kildall was the man behind the company. Nonetheless, Kildall agreed to meet with Gates in the spring of 1985 at the four seasons hotel in Seattle.
In his unpublished memoir, Kildall said the meeting was friendly. And for some reason, I opened up to Bill. I told him about the CD-ROM work that I was doing. We talked to standards, we talked for hours. He even told Gates about an upcoming conference on CD-ROM technology that he was planning to hold in the near future in order to promote the technology. Ballouman is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath.
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He was thereby astonished to receive, soon after, an invitation to be a keynote speaker at a Microsoft sponsored CD-ROM conference. Friends urged Kildall not to attend. We told him he was playing right into Gates' hands, but he didn't get it, said one. Kildall did attend the Microsoft conference, and he gave a speech.
Many later did he learn from another friend inside Microsoft that apparently Gates had come straight back to the office after that meeting in the four seasons to set up a Microsoft CD-ROM conference simply to preempt Kildall's own. It was clever, it was divisive, it was manipulative, it is Bill Gates' nature. I must give him credit for being a very opportunistic person.
The nature of these two men, Gates and Kildall was certainly very different, and so where their instincts for business, their visions for where technology was headed. At a different conference later in the 80s, where both Gates and Kildall were participating in a roundtable panel about software in general, Kildall expounded at length about how the software market was so vast, it could support several different major platforms.
When it was his time to speak, Gates replied, quote, there's room for just one. End quote. Indeed, if you remember anything about the early 90s boom lit for CD-ROM technology, there's probably only one title you remember, and it is indeed a CD-ROM encyclopedia, but it was called Microsoft and Karta. And more frustratingly, it was that damned Gary went flying legend that seemed to dog Kildall.
As Bill Gates became the poster boy for the personal computer revolution in the 1980s, Gary Kildall began to feel that history was starting to slight him, and he apparently felt it keenly. And Gary met Maso Morita in 1987. The first question that that sion of the Japanese technology powerhouse Sony asked him was, were you really flying when IBM came calling?
Kildall's longtime friend, Tom Rolender, confirms that Kildall, indeed, got jealous of history's slight, saying quote, the more the fortune and influence of Bill Gates grew, the more he became obsessed. Day and night, the film of that day played in his head. It wasn't a question of money. What really hurt him was the myth. Gary felt no one accorded any importance to what he had accomplished.
Gary Kildall's marriage to Dorothy Kildall collapsed in the early 1980s, and a second subsequent marriage ended in divorce as well. Kildall accounts I read of Kildall's later years mentioned, bouts of depression as well as a growing problem with alcohol. One account mentioned Kildall's ability to drink like a quote, college freshman. And a friend was quoted as saying, alcohol was Kildall's weapon of choice. But in other accounts, there is a sense of a growing obsession, a paranoia even.
Kildall told people he suspected Gates was having him followed, in order to seize the next brilliant business idea that he dreamed up. He said that when he looked at Doss, he saw his own brain. Another of Kildall's friends was quoted as saying, Gary was stewing over Gates. No question. But frankly, he was rich, and he had nothing to do. In a situation like that, you can sit there and obsess over stuff, and he did.
Two other major events are reported to have darkened Kildall's previously optimistic disposition. A major obsession of Kildall's later in life was the creation of a software language easy enough for elementary school students to learn. He wanted to teach kids to code. And so he adopted a version of the logo programming language, calling it DR logo or Dr logo. And he marketed it as an alternative to the popular beginner programming language of the time, which was coincidentally basic.
I felt that kids using basic on the Apple II and IBM's new PC were being taught archaic mind tools to solve problems. The most popular version of basic at the time was Microsoft basic, the original version of which had been written by Bill Gates himself. And Microsoft continued to aggressively market its version of basic. Just Gary Kildall's luck, once again, his program couldn't compete with Microsoft's in the marketplace. Dr logo sold poorly.
In his memoir, Kildall wrote, it was then that I learned that computers were built to make money. The other Gates-related incident was possibly even more personally disillusioning. When the University of Washington celebrated the 25th anniversary of its computer science program, it invited Gary Kildall, as perhaps the most illustrious graduate of that program, to attend the Gala celebration.
But it also asked Bill Gates, who was an alumni not of UW, but of Harvard, and who famously never even finished his degree, to be the Gala's keynote speaker. Kildall would write in his memoir. The UW Computer Science Department educated me so that I could produce compilers like PLM. Then I made CPM a success through millions of copies sold throughout the world. Again, using my knowledge gained through education at the UW.
Gates takes my work and makes it his own through divisive measures at best. He made his cash cow MS-doss from CPM. So Gates, representing wealth and being proud of the fact that he is a Harvard dropout, without requirement for an education, delivers a lecture at the 25th reunion of the computer science class. Well, it seems to me he did have an education to get there. It happened to be mine, not his. On July 8, 1994, Gary Kildall was in the Franklin Street Bar and Grill.
In downtown Monterey, California. In some accounts, there were bikers in this bar. And in some accounts, some sort of fisticuffs ensued. In other accounts, Kildall merely fell and hid his head. Whatever the inciting incident was, Kildall initially refused medical attention. In subsequent days, Kildall twice went to the hospital, but was apparently released on both occasions.
Three days later, on July 11, Gary Kildall died of a cerebral hemorrhage, apparently caused by a blood clot which had formed between his brain and his skull. He was 52 years old. Over the years, journalists, historians, and industry veterans alike have tried to chip away at the legend of Gary Kildall, just as I've done here.
And I've used all of the various accounts and recollections and theories I could find, including half a dozen books and more than two dozen articles, blog posts, and interviews. Nearly 40 years on from the events we've outlined here, there's really only one thing I think we can say with certainty. The legend Gary went flying is definitively a myth.
There's plenty of evidence from plenty of sources that Gary Kildall met with IBM, and indeed tried to pursue a business deal with them to provide CPM as the operating system for the IBM PC. The rest of the questions surrounding this legend, however, are not so clear cut. For example, was QDoS, and thus Microsoft DoS, a ripoff of CPM.
While plenty of people who have greater programming chops than I have looked into this often on over the years, and as far as I was able to uncover, no one has delivered any forensics that even remotely support the claim that CPM was software thievery, or even software cloning.
In fact, many analysts have claimed that in whatever ways the structure of the two operating systems were similar, QDoS made several key improvements that actually made early versions of DoS, meaningfully functionally superior to the original CPM. As far as I know, no one has ever been able to answer the mystery of that function $9 sign that Gary Kildall famously asked people to ask Bill Gates about.
Nonetheless, could Gary Kildall have won some sort of lawsuit against IBM, or at least Microsoft? Again, I defer to people with better knowledge of the vagaries of the legal system, but I feel like it's clear to me that the person Gary Kildall was, was not someone who would have been willing to endure decades of expensive litigation just to prove a point.
It should be noted that QDoS was on the market before Microsoft bought it, and digital research had never bothered to sue them, so maybe there wouldn't have been any standing to begin with. But what would have happened if IBM had gone with Gary Kildall over Bill Gates?
Now there is an interesting question, because had IBM been able to wait for Kildall's later, greater CPM 86 with its multitasking abilities, and had they been on board with his later innovations with things like easy computer networking and multimedia, there is indeed an interesting alternative history to imagine. Multitasking, networking, multimedia, these things did not become widespread and mainstream until at least the early 1990s.
Had IBM launched its flagship personal computer, the computer in the platform that became the standard and defined the industry, with these innovations, how much further ahead would personal computing itself had been by say 1990? But that leads to the question of whether or not Gary Kildall was the right man to lead the computer revolution of the 1980s. And frankly, I'm not sure that I can say that he was. I'm not even sure that Gary Kildall and digital research were even a good fit for IBM.
Remember to launch the IBM PC, IBM was demanding a crash development schedule. It was demanding intense secrecy and padlock rooms in the whole nine yards. And remember working with IBM would require digital research to drop everything else it was doing, every other customer, every other initiative, and tie its fortunes to a capricious business partner that demanded digital research not only jump when requested, but also have already calculated how high.
Bill Gates and Microsoft had no compunction with any of this. After signing the deal with IBM in November of 1980, Bill Gates famously told his mother at the Gates family Thanksgiving dinner that year that she shouldn't expect to see him again for at least six months. That was how busy he expected to be. Gary Kildall, if you'll remember, went on vacation immediately after meeting with IBM. Bill Gates, indeed, dropped everything Microsoft was working on in order to make the deal with IBM happen.
And I simply can't see Gary Kildall and digital research being capable of doing the same thing. But really, how many businessmen could rationally have made the call that Bill Gates made? Think of the risks he was taking. Firstly, going into the IBM relationship, he knew that this was a project that had a precarious future within Big Blue. Quoting Gates himself, they seriously talked about canceling the project up until the last minute.
And we had put so many of the company's resources into this thing. Secondly, Gates was gambling by taking his company into an arena with which it had not previously had any experience. Microsoft certainly knew languages, but what level of competency did it have with OS's? Thirdly, think of the risk that Microsoft was taking by adopting the OS that it was adopting. On some level, Gates had to know that QDOS had at least a passing similarity to CPM, shall we say.
At the very least, he had to know that there was the potential for legal problems down the road. One password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users and over 100,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. It beat out 40 other options to become wire cutters top pick for password managers. This is the password manager I myself have used for a decade or more.
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Remember, Microsoft tied its entire corporate fortunes to IBM for more than a decade. Microsoft's embrace of big blue would last until the early 90s when, as crazy as this is to believe, Microsoft was still partnering with IBM when it was creating the OS2 operating system, a system that was designed to pre-empt Microsoft Windows and make Microsoft itself redundant. Would Gary Kildall have been that crazy MacAvellion for that long? And would Gary Kildall have been as brilliant as Bill Gates?
Would he have gotten as brilliant a deal? It turned out that the key clause in Microsoft's original contract with IBM was the one that allowed it to sell MSDOS, its operating system, its software platform, to other vendors. It was when DOS Windows became the key standard. When other PC makers cloned the IBM PC and when Bill Gates could provide his operating system to compact to HP, to Packard Bell, to Dell, that is when, and that is why Bill Gates became the wealthiest man in the world.
Would Gary Kildall have been true enough to insert a clause like that into a contract with IBM? In the end, I think this story is a testament to the technical genius of Gary Kildall and the business genius of Bill Gates. Perhaps the Twain never should have met. As Alan Cooper, the father of visual basic, said, quote, it was Gary's bad luck that put him up against the most skilled businessman of all time. Anyone looks like a failure standing next to Bill Gates.
But certainly, in the eyes of history, this seems to be true. But I think that history owes more to Gary Kildall than mere comparisons to Bill Gates or Hori Legends about missed business opportunities. And in the last several years, it's been nice to see that Gary Kildall has begun to get the posthumous recognition that his career deserves. Kildall has been honored by the Software Publishers Association.
The city of Pacific Grove, California has installed a plaque outside the former headquarters of digital research. The IEEE has inducted Kildall into what is essentially the tech world's version of the Hall of Fame. And the Computer History Museum has made available the original source code of the earliest versions of CPM. The reason I think we should all pour one out to the memory of Gary Kildall is because he played such a key role in the software industry as we know it today.
As the historian Harold Evans said, Gary Kildall laid the groundwork for the third-party software market. He created the first meaningful operating system of the modern computing era, and therefore, he invented the idea of the software platform, the ecosystem upon which other applications can thrive. How many times in episodes of this podcast have we spoken about web and internet companies striving to create or own a platform, from Netscape to Facebook to Uber and even beyond?
Gary Kildall invented the idea of the software platform, agnostic to hardware, agnostic even to use case. Many developer working today to create software apps to serve existing software platforms. For Android, for iOS, for Windows, or even OS 10, any developer working today owes a debt of gratitude to Gary Kildall.