This was the very first episode of the Computer Chronicles,
broadcast back in 1983.
When we first launched this series, sitting by my side
as co-host was Gary Kildall.
But Gary was a lot more than a TV host.
Gary, in fact, was one of the most important individuals
in the history of personal computing.
Gary died last year, leaving a legacy not matched
by many in this field.
Today, we're going to devote the entire show to Gary Kildall
and his role in the development of the personal computer
on this special edition of the Computer Chronicles.
The Computer Chronicles is brought to you
by rondiamond.com, the oldies site on the internet.
Music and memories from the 50s, 60s, and 70s,
not just another jukebox.
Additional support comes from the law offices of Ivan Hoffman,
lawyering with integrity for internet law, copyright,
trademark, and other intellectual property law.
And by TechWeb for up to the minute technology news.
On a residential block in the seaside town of Pacific Grove,
California, sits a modest house with a grand history.
Behind its garage in a small carriage house,
one of the seminal events in personal computing history
took place.
The first modern operating system for the microcomputer
was born here over 20 years ago.
It was called CPM, and its inventor
was a young computer science teacher named Gary Kildall.
Kildall had started developing his control program
for microcomputers, also known as control program
monitor, in the early 1970s when he realized
the potential for a general purpose small computer.
He was carrying a portable computer
at a time when the desktop PC was just a dream.
I met Gary in 1973 in the computer science lab late one
evening.
He was a young kid, freckled, reddish hair,
boyish enthusiasm, was in cutoffs,
came into the computer center with a leather briefcase
that he flipped open and connected
to a teletype, an ASR 33.
And that was an entire self-contained computer.
It was the first personal computer I ever saw.
And I went wild.
I wanted to know where he got it, how he got it,
what he was doing with it, how I could get one.
Gary studied computer science at the University of Washington
and went on to obtain a doctorate.
He soon moved to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey,
where he later became a professor.
In the 1970s, the seeds of CPM were
planted during his teaching career at Monterey.
He continued to work on the project at home
and later in this tiny rooftop office
above a restaurant in Pacific Grove.
The first thing I heard that Gary did that was really
brought to my attention was he invented a programming
language called PLM and implemented it
for the Intel microprocessors to prove
that the 8088 was the 8080, I'm sorry, was a real computer
and not a controller for microwave ovens,
but that it was a real computer.
And he went off and wrote a programming language
that ran on microcomputers.
Now, we can say, well, of course that's no big deal.
But at the time, it was a pretty big deal.
He invented this language.
And then to show that the language was useful,
he wrote CPM.
That's what really actually happened.
He created this operating system and built it
around this Intel microprocessor to show what could
be done with microprocessors.
And in 1975, when he was doing this,
that was pretty revolutionary.
Gary's approach to computing was far ahead
of the conventional notions of the time.
While a consultant at Intel in the 70s,
he offered to sell them CPM, but Intel could see no use for it
and turned him down.
Shortly afterwards, in 1976, Gary and his wife, Dorothy,
founded a company called Intergalactic Digital Research,
later shortened to Digital Research
in an old Victorian home.
In the early days, Digital Research Incorporated, or DRI,
was CPM.
While the operating system is just a dim memory in most PC
users' minds today, its role in the development
of the microcomputer was pivotal.
What's so important about the work that Gary did
was the fact that he was one of the first to introduce
an operating system for personal computers that
began laying the groundwork that basically
all other personal computer operating systems, hardware
design, and applications can take their roots from.
The main thing that CPM brought that
was different from how anybody else was approaching
microcomputers was that Gary made a logical separation
of the physical IOS system from what was called the BDOS.
The physical IOS system was called the BIOS,
the basic IOS system.
And that was a term that Gary used in early CPM.
The BDOS was a basic disk operating system.
The BDOS was independent of the specific hardware
that you had in your microcomputer by comparison.
And we were looking at the time of Unix
being out as a major mini-computer operating system.
And you could not move executables of any application
programs from one Unix machine, unless it
was an identical machine, to another system.
So this was really a remarkable innovation.
CPM sold extremely well, and DRI flourished.
The company expanded to larger quarters across the street.
The number of employees grew from 9 to 24.
When the new VAX mini-computer arrived,
it was too large to fit inside the building.
So the entire structure was lifted off its foundation
to accommodate the machine.
A beaming Gary told the staff they would all
be getting a raise that week.
It was a time of skyrocketing growth.
By August of 1982, the company newsletter
reported that DRI's revenues had grown over 1,000%
in the past two years.
DRI now had 200 employees.
CPM was established as the industry standard.
And the most popular 8-bit operating system in the world.
When the computer industry was just starting up,
there was the computer industry.
There was IBM and the Seven Dwarfs
and the mainframe industry dominated by glass houses
and giant mainframe computers.
It cost millions and millions of dollars.
And the personal computer industry
did not descend genealogically from that gene pool.
It sprung up in a completely separate way
in a completely separate place.
And Gary was its spiritual leader.
His company was the biggest and most successful
of all of the companies.
And all of the companies were modeled after Gary's.
Gary was a very busy guy.
He was chairman of a large company.
He was personally involved in new product development.
Yet every two weeks, he would spend four hours
driving up and down the Pacific Coast Highway
to spend a day in front of the cameras
when we come back Gary's new role as a television host.
With DRI's business growing, Gary
went on to other pursuits, including the role of co-host
on Computer Chronicles.
His second career as television host
lasted over six years, during which he
provided acute insights into the technology and potential
of hundreds of products.
While appearing on the program, he also
showed off products and technologies of his own
that were far ahead of the market,
including a multitasking operating system for PCs
called Concurrent DOS.
What's even more interesting is that all is not
quite as it appears.
Because in fact, if you press a little key here,
you actually see that there are lots and lots of processes
actually running, lots of tasks running here.
And in fact, on these serial terminals even themselves,
I can hit a key on this one, for example,
and find that I'm running D-Base 3 at the same time.
So what we're seeing here is the ability of the IBM PS2 Model
80 as a 386-based machine in conjunction
with Concurrent DOS 386, its ability
to run both standard DOS applications,
because the operating system is completely DOS compatible,
but to be able to run multiple DOS applications
and to allow shared access to them.
DRI also had one of the first graphical user interfaces
called GEM.
I'll open up a pre-prepared graph,
and we'll see what the combination of text
and graphics look like.
I'm going to go to a full scale, full screen here.
You can see here's the final result of putting together
text with graphics.
And I'll just go ahead and send this to the output device.
And in this case, we're going to just use a screen.
But it could be a slide maker or a over-transparency maker,
whatever it happens to be.
And that would be it.
Well, I think that his interest was in, first of all,
showing that digital research was still the leader and not
and that we had, since graphical environments were sort
of becoming hot, if you will, and the Lisa hadn't really
been successful but word on the street was Macintosh is coming.
And the fact that he could go and show
a multitasking graphical-oriented environment
running as a digital research project
that no one knew at all that we were even working on,
I think he appreciated the kind of surprise factor of that.
And I remember him coming back and saying
that Bill Gates and other people were at this conference
that Esther Dyson had.
And their eyes were glued to the screen trying
to see what that was going on.
So I think we put some fear in Microsoft.
And I think Gary liked that.
Gary's pleasure at beating everyone to the starting gate
with new ideas may have been personally satisfying.
But it was also risky.
By revealing DRI projects, he was also
divulging information that could be
appropriated by other companies.
And this created a unique ethical situation
for Gary and his chief competitor.
I really believe that on a scale of 1 to 10,
10 being ethical, Bill Gates is about a 9.
I think that there are some other corporate presidents
out there that are about the 3s and the 4s.
I don't want to be an apologist for Bill Gates.
But I'm saying that Gary is just on a different scale.
His ethics is a different scale.
And what happened is Bill used his ethical scale, which
was a darn good one.
And Gary used his ethical scale, which is a darn good one.
Now, the ethics of a businessman are generally
one that is very, very competitive.
And the ethics of an academician,
although they're certainly competitive,
involves a much greater degree of cooperation.
And so Gary always cooperated.
He always said, well, Bill, here's what we're working on.
And Bill always said, well, that guy sure
was a kind of a dummy.
He just told me what he's working on.
I don't think Gary was really driven to be a businessman.
Gary was driven to create things.
And every time I talked to him, he
had some really great ideas of things he was going to do,
or things that could be done, or things he was working on,
or new technologies and how he might apply them.
That was Gary.
This is a beta copy of the very first electronic encyclopedia
using optical storage technology.
Gary gave it to me one day when we
were taping a show in the studio in that building over there.
Gary had to use a video disc because CD-ROM technology was
not yet widely available.
He was very proud of this.
This was the first product of his new interactive company,
then called ActiveVenture.
In 1985, Gary showed the very first encyclopedia
on a CD-ROM, a project that grew out of his fascination
with early video discs.
The Grolier Academic American Encyclopedia
had many features that are commonplace today,
including hypertext links, a full text search engine,
and a traditional bookshelf interface.
This is what we need to select.
And it's working its way down through the volume
here, giving us finer and finer divisions.
And finally, we go down and find the article titles.
And here they are, just as if we were thumbing
through that section of the encyclopedia.
And we can point to the title we wish to examine.
So you're just pulling out that article now.
That's right.
Here it is.
It's the exploits of Raoul Amundsen.
In this point, you can page back and forth,
take a look at the article and things of that sort.
Now, that's all in a CD-ROM that's in this player right
here.
And what's the amount of storage involved?
How much?
This is 550 megabytes, half a billion bytes of information,
enough to stretch 10 characters per inch from here to Denver.
Gary's success also gave him time to pursue his love of life.
He collected and raced sports cars.
Experienced pilot, he owned several airplanes.
And he never hesitated to fly to meetings across the state
or across the country.
I went out to visit Gary.
And we arranged to meet in the airport in San Jose.
When I got to the airport, he was flying his own private plane
in.
So I was meeting him in the terminal for private planes.
I looked around the airport.
No Gary.
There wasn't anyone who looked like a software person
wandering around this very small terminal.
So I called the company.
And they said, oh, look for Gary.
He'll have on cowboy boots and has a red beard.
I knew I could find him then.
And he still wasn't there.
So I looked out the door, the window,
and a plane came rolling up.
And this fellow with a red beard leaned out the window
and said, there aren't any parking places.
Hop in.
Gary flew his potential investor to a restaurant near Sacramento
and proceeded to describe the future of the PC industry.
At that time, he was trying to explain what his business was.
And I had lunch.
And he basically took a paper and outlined the microcomputer
industry to me.
He explained how the operating system would ultimately
control the industry and how application software would
run on top of it and that an operating system company should
support the applications companies
but never have applications, which it turned out
to be a fatal mistake and one of the fatal mistakes
for the company.
Even as Gary's financial success allowed
him to accumulate bigger and faster toys,
his contemporaries remember him as a man
who just enjoyed having fun.
Gary had that ability to be innovative.
And yet, on the other hand, he had this amazing free spirit
about him.
Gary was certainly easy to talk into grabbing a six-pack of beer
and going out to the lake and water skiing.
There was never a problem with that aspect of it either.
He was a very, very unusual and remarkable individual.
The early days of the microcomputer industry
created an exciting atmosphere that
attracted adventurous entrepreneurs.
To the PC pioneers, working outside
of the mainstream mainframe computer world
made it more risky but more satisfying.
There were very, very few people in those first years
who came into the computer industry,
who came into the microcomputer industry,
from the real computer industry.
The attitude that pervaded Silicon Valley in 1980
was, when are the grown-ups going
to come in here and make us stop?
That was really what it felt like.
Because we could do things that we could do whatever we wanted.
CPM's role as the standard operating
system for personal computers was not to last very long.
When we come back, the battle between CPM and MS-DOS
and the true story of what happened
with IBM and Bill Gates.
And despite his varied talents and accomplishments,
Gary Kildall was perhaps best known
as the man who chose to go flying
on the day IBM came calling.
It was the event which dogged him his entire life.
And it has become a legend in personal computer history.
But his friends and co-workers alike
agree that the story is mostly myth
and that the facts are very different.
Gary and I were scheduled to go that morning up
to meet with Bill Godbout, who was
one of the early people in the microcomputer industry building
an S-100 system.
And we were delivering him CPM documentation.
So Gary and I, as the story goes, were in fact flying.
We flew up to the Bay Area, up to the 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 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 was structured.
IBM also wanted to buy CPM outright for a flat fee
and rename it PC-DOS, terms that were unacceptable to DRI.
IBM then approached Microsoft and tried
to license its clone of CPM called Q-DOS.
When IBM discovered that it might be facing a copyright
lawsuit, they returned to DRI and struck a deal.
DRI agreed to let IBM sell both CPM and Microsoft-DOS side
by side and to let the market decide which was best.
But the deck was stacked.
I can only tell you that we were quite shocked to see
that the price for PC-DOS was $40
and the price for CPM-86 was $240.
We were given no indication at all
whatsoever until it was actually rolled out
that they were going to do a 6 to 1 price difference.
So in fact, IBM did let the market decide.
It was pretty hard to imagine that somebody could justify
buying CPM-86, which had very similar functionality to PC-DOS
when there was a 6 to 1 price difference.
Some industry people have pointed to this incident
as a turning point in PC history and the moment that
guaranteed the demise of CPM and the rise of MS-DOS.
Others have pointed out that it somehow
changed Gary professionally and personally.
The frustration that I think more and more frustrated
and to a degree, I have to be honest about,
embittered him some in later years
was the fact that he continually had this comparison thrust
on him, that any time he would have an interview
or meet a company in a business context,
there were the frequent questions,
did you really go flying when IBM came to visit?
What really happened?
So that would frequently be asked.
And that was always a frustration
because Gary was a person that I think
was very proud of his achievements, of the fact
that he actually was instrumental in building
this open architecture that we have in the industry.
I think Gary's view was that what happened happened.
I think he, if anything, regretted
that people didn't appreciate the contributions he made.
I think all people who are really driven to do something
and are very bright spend some time wondering
about the ones that got away.
But I think of all the people I've known in business,
Gary worried the least about the ones that got away.
DRI's loss of the IBM contract was
Microsoft's gain and the beginning of Microsoft's ascent
to software stardom.
But the reasons for IBM's decisions
are still fuzzy and subject to different interpretations.
I think what really changed the perspective from IBM's
standpoint had to do with the fact
that when Gates got involved, he basically said, look,
we'll do whatever you need.
We'll put energy.
We'll put people.
We'll work as hard as we can to make this happen.
As opposed to the way Gary Kildell and his folks
looked at it, which was, oh, here's another project.
Remember, Kildell had already reached a certain level
of success at that point, where at this particular time,
Gates and the folks at Microsoft were
in their very early stages.
But I think that there's also some,
I don't think blame's exactly the right word,
but some responsibility goes to the customers as well.
Because if IBM had not put all of their eggs in the Microsoft
basket, they wouldn't have the problem
that they do today, trying to sell Warp against an OS2
against the monster that they kind of created.
Whatever the reason, the competition
between DRI and Microsoft seemed to become a personal battle
between Gary Kildell and Bill Gates,
at least in the public eye.
Well, Gary always considered Bill Gates a very good friend.
In those early days, they all sat,
they all were very friendly with each other and cooperative.
And certainly Bill Gates says today
that he sent IBM to DRI when they were looking
for the operating system.
I was on a panel that Ben Rosen put on for the Rosen
Forum in those very early days.
And Gary got up and talked about what his plans were for CPM
and where the company was going and then made a comment.
Well, this is a very large market,
and there's room for lots of companies.
And Bill Gates interrupted, and he said, no, there'll
only be one company.
Gary Kildall's life cannot be summed up by any one incident.
It was made up of many notable accomplishments
and a constant desire to innovate.
His numerous contributions to the PC industry
are evident, if not always recognized.
To those who knew him well, it was the delight of discovery
and not the money that drove him.
And I think that in his mind, what he was always looking for
is, what is it that he could get or do
or create with technology that would be his big win?
And that was elusive.
And the fact that it was elusive, I think,
played very heavily on the way he lived
the latter part of his life.
Gary Kildall's untimely death in 1994 at the age of 52
was a reminder that the light of genius
is transitory and fragile.
To his many friends and associates,
it was a warning that we should cherish our relationships
while we can.
He is among a very small group of people
that helped change the world in the 70s.
And I think another group of people
have taken advantage of it in the 80s and the 90s.
And I'm sure that that will continue.
But Gary made a difference.
I think he knew he made a difference.
And certainly, the people who knew Gary
knew he made a difference.
I think at this point in time, it
would be a shame to have Gary forgotten
as being a person that was instrumental to the growing
of this whole industry itself.
Gary was somebody that had an infectious enthusiasm.
If you go out in the industry and talk with associates
that he worked with at a business level,
knew Gary as a person that enjoyed
the warmth of human contact, that enjoyed going to parties,
to be very personable.
He was not somebody that restricted his focus
to just the decision makers and the people that
were leading the businesses and whatever.
He was somebody that had a breadth of interests
and was a very open person.
So I think it would be a real loss if all that the industry
remembers about Gary is he was the guy that
was flying the day IBM came.
Because he was much, much more of a person
and contributed a great deal to this industry.
He was a great person.
Gary did make a difference.
He was a genius and a gentleman, a rare combination.
Gary did make a lot of money, but he
was driven by an honest desire to create
new ideas that could expand the human potential.
For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Stuart Shafae.
The Computer Chronicles is brought to you by rondiamond.com,
the oldies site on the internet.
Music and memories from the 50s, 60s, and 70s,
not just another jukebox.
Additional support comes from the Law Offices of Ivan Hoffman,
Lawyering with Integrity, for internet law, copyright,
trademark, and other intellectual property law.
And by TechWeb, for up to the minute technology news.
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