Gary Kildall

Gary Kildall (May 19, 1942 – July 11, 1994) was an American computer scientist, creator of the CP/M operating system (later DR-DOS and the graphical user interface). GEM Desktop, and founder of Digital Research).

Biography

Dorothy McEwen accepted him as her husband in 1963 while they were both in high school. With the birth of their first child, Scott, they moved to the Monterey Peninsula in 1969. In 1971 they had their first daughter, Kristin. Kildall graduated as a professor of mathematics from the University of Washington in Seattle in the early 1970s..

While working as a professor at the Naval Post Graduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California, he created implementations of the PL/I programming language for the 4004 and 8008 microprocessors while also consulting for Intel. PhD in Computer Science, he dedicated himself in 1973 to writing an operating system for the Intel Intellec 8. He referred to those versions as PL/M, M for microcomputer and from there CP/M arose.

After offering his CP/M work to Intel, this company showed no interest in it, so together with his wife Dorothy he founded the company Intergalactic Digital Research in 1974, and its headquarters was located at 801 Lighthouse Avenue, Pacific Grove, California. After resigning from his job in 1976 at NPS it was renamed Digital Research Incorporated. He continued to work at CP/M and initially sold it in classified ads on the back pages of computer magazines.

With the release of the Altair 8800 in January 1975 there was finally a commercial system capable of running CP/M, and before the end of that year there were several clone computers with disk systems that required it. By 1977, it was the most popular microcomputer operating system in existence, running on almost all computers based on an Intel 8080 or Zilog Z80 processor. At that time, Digital Research's income reached US$25 million, equivalent to more than US$100 million in 2018 due to the devaluation of that currency with respect to inflation.

In 1980, IBM approached Digital Research looking for a version of CP/M for its next personal computer. Kildall kept the IBM men waiting for several hours to fly in his plane with his wife, who was on her birthday and was the one who handled business relations for the company. Another story says that IBM wanted Dorothy to sign their agreement not to standard disclosure, which she considered too limiting. Essentially Digital Research demanded a payment for each copy sold while IBM wanted a large payment for the rights to use, without limitations.IBM went back to talk to Microsoft and Bill Gates saw the business opportunity of a lifetime from him. He obtained the rights to a CP/M clone called QDOS (for Quick and Dirty Operating S ystem) written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer, licensed it to IBM, and MS-DOS/PC-DOS was born.

IBM later discovered that Gates's operating system might have infringed CP/M's copyright, contacted Kildall, and agreed that Kildall would not sue them in exchange for it along with PC-DOS being sell the CP/M. The set price was $250 for CP/M and $40 for PC-DOS.

The decision to use Microsoft's operating system was the beginning of the end for Digital Research as the world's largest producer of software for microcomputers.

DR-DOS

Digital Research lost the long battle to promote their CPM-86 so they modified it to run the same applications as MS-DOS and PC-DOS, re-releasing it in May 1988 as DR-DOS. The first public version was DR-DOS 3.41 which offered better features than the then MS-DOS 3.3.

This was another losing battle: although the product with each version featured innovations that always compared favorably against MS-DOS, Digital Research couldn't keep up with the unfair competition from Microsoft and Gary ended up selling his company to Novell, however the product still exists in different incarnations.

GEM Desktop

Another important Gary product was the first graphical user interface for the 8086 processor, GEM Desktop, released in February 1985. Despite its capabilities, the product was not very successful as a stand-alone system, and its last public version came out in November 1988. However, it continued to be sold to companies as a graphical interface for their products, with the Atari ST and Ventura Publisher standing out. It was also used in Digital Research for derivative products such as ViewMax. His development pipeline survived until Novell's acquisition of Digital Research.

Other projects

After CP/M, concerned about the proliferation of BASIC on microcomputers, Kildall created PL/I-80, a subset of the PL/I programming language that ran on CP/M computers. He also developed several experimental projects, including an implementation of the LOGO educational programming language, interfaces between computers and CD-ROM drives, and videodisc players. In addition, he created a CD-ROM version of Grolier & # 39; s Encyclopedia in 1985, the Academic American Encyclopedia being the first to achieve this (his prototype was recorded on videodisc since the CD -ROM had not been released).

Retirement and death

He left Digital Research in 1991 when the company was sold to Novell, and moved to suburban Austin, Texas, maintaining a second home in California and helping children with HIV. Friends and acquaintances acknowledge how disappointed he was he was about how MS-DOS, with a design based almost entirely on his ideas for CP/M, made Bill Gates and Microsoft famous, while he languished in obscurity. He never again appeared on television shows such as & # 34; The Computer Chronicle & # 34; where he served as a co-host.

Divorced in 1983, turned alcoholic, on July 8, 1994 in Monterey, California, suffered severe head injuries in a fight at the "Franklin Street Bar and Grill," a hangout for motorcyclists, and died of internal bleeding three days later.

Acknowledgments

In the words of his son Scott Kildall, in an interview published April 25 in the online magazine GeekWire:

"He was a true inventor. He was much more interested in creating new ideas and giving them to the world than being the one who gave them to the market and taking advantage of a lot of benefits. (...) He was always sharing his ideas, and he sat down with people and showed the letters of the workflows he thought about. »

In March 1995, he was posthumously honored by the Software Publishers Association of the United States for his contributions to the computer industry:

• Introduction of multitasking operating systems with user interfaces with windows and menus.

• Creation of the first scheme buffering a disk drive tracks, advanced reading algorithms, directory structure cache, and RAM virtual disk emulators.

• Introduction of the binary recompiler in the 1980s.

• The first programming language and the first specific compiler for a microcomputer.

• The first disk operating system for a microprocessor, which came to sell a quarter of a million copies.

• The first computer interface for videodiscs that allowed automatic non-linear playback, preying the current multimedia content.

• The file system and data structure of the first CD-ROM consumption.

• The first successful open system architecture, by segregating system-specific hardware interfaces to a set of BIOS routines, making the software industry developed by third parties possible.

On April 25, 2014, the "Instituto de Ingenieros Eléctricos y Electrónicos", through the Milestones Program (in computing and electrical engineering), unveiled a plaque located in the former headquarters of Digital Research. This honor is reserved for major events or achievements and is inscribed with recognition of the corresponding work or event. The one granted to Gary Kildall reads verbatim as follows, translated into Spanish:

«The Dr. Gary A. Kildall demonstrated the first functional prototype of CP/M (Microprocessor Control Program) in Pacific Grove in 1974. Along with its invention of the BIOS (Basic Input and Output System), the operating system of Kildall allowed a computer based on a microprocessor to communicate with a disk storage unit and provided an important foundation for the revolution of personal computers."