Comments on: Gary Kildall’s death investigation https://dfarq.homeip.net/gary-kildalls-death-investigation/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gary-kildalls-death-investigation David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more Fri, 11 Jul 2025 11:10:05 +0000 hourly 1 By: Dave Farquhar https://dfarq.homeip.net/gary-kildalls-death-investigation/#comment-43245 Thu, 26 May 2016 03:28:15 +0000 https://dfarq.homeip.net/?p=8456#comment-43245 In reply to lrm.

Thanks for that explanation. All I’d ever heard was that he copied the command and syntax from DEC minicomputers. So to check out what you’d been told, I did a Google search on “peripheral interchange program” and sure enough, that was a command on PDP-6, PDP-8, PDP-10, and PDP-11, and that was what inspired Kildall.

Thanks again!

]]> By: lrm https://dfarq.homeip.net/gary-kildalls-death-investigation/#comment-43244 Wed, 25 May 2016 23:13:45 +0000 https://dfarq.homeip.net/?p=8456#comment-43244 Always nice to be reminded of the early days. This post lead me back to a previous one “Was CP/M overrated?” in which you wonder about the origins of PIP as a name for copy. Perhaps I can help. I was first introduced to personal computers back in a982 when I was working at AT&T in an interactive videodisc group (right around the time of divestiture). I was hired as a Producer but all of us had Sony SMC-70 computers with dual floppy drives running CP/M with WordStar 3.x and dBase II. At some point I needed to some files to another disk and was introduced to PIP by one of the programmers. I asked why it was called PIP instead of something more logical like, say, copy. PIP I was told was a acronym for Peripheral Interchange Program. Whether it was true or whether the programmer was just blowing smoke I have no idea.

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