Soon after, he created the BIOS, which enabled CP/M to easily interface with different computer hardware.ĬP/M became the de facto standard personal computer operating system in these early days. In 1974, he invented CP/M, the first operating system that could run on these new desktop platforms. In this excerpt Gary writes about his vision for bringing the new microprocessors into homes and businesses. With this perspective, we offer a portion of our father’s unpublished memoirs so that you can read about his experiences and reflections on the early days of the computer industry, directly in his own voice. His work ethic during the 1970s resembles that of the open-source community today. His career choices reflect a different definition of success, where innovation means sharing ideas, letting passion drive your work and making source code available for others to build upon. Gary viewed computers as learning tools rather than profit engines. Unfortunately, this tall tale paints Gary as a ‘could-have-been,’ ignores his deep contributions, and overshadows his role as an inventor of key technologies that define how computer platforms run today. Those who have heard of him may recall the myth that he ‘missed’ the opportunity to become Bill Gates by going flying instead of meeting with IBM. “Our father, Gary Kildall, was one of the founders of the personal computer industry, but you probably don’t know his name. With their permission, we are pleased to make available the first portion of that memoir, along with their introduction to it and previously unpublished family photos. The ownership of that manuscript passed to Gary’s children, Scott and Kristin. He distributed bound copies to family and friends, with a note that it “will go to print in final form early next year.” It never did. In 1993, the year before his untimely death, Gary wrote a draft of a memoir titled Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the Evolution of the Personal Computer Industry. He never published an autobiography, and there are no book-length biographies. The influence on the nascent personal computer industry was profound.īut what do we know about the man who created all this? Kildall died in 1994, at the young age of 52. In other CHM blog posts we have told the story of Digital Research and CP/M by celebrating its 40th anniversary, and releasing the source code. Thousands of programs were written to run under it, and a million or more people might have used it. He and his wife, Dorothy McEwen, started a successful company called Digital Research to develop and market CP/M, which for years was the dominant operating system for personal microcomputers. He created a widely-used disk operating system (CP/M). He wrote programming language tools, including assemblers (Intel 4004), interpreters (BASIC), and compilers (PL/M). Gary Kildall was a pioneer of personal computer software.
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