Gary Kildall and what might have been

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , ,
Gary Kildall and what might have been

I didn’t have time to write everything I wanted to write yesterday, so I’m going to revisit Bill Gates and Gary Kildall today. Bill Gates’ side of the DOS story is relatively well documented in his biographies: Gates referred IBM to Gary Kildall, who for whatever reason was less comfortable working with IBM than Gates was. And there was an airplane involved, though what Kildall was doing in the airplane and why varies. By some accounts he was meeting another client, and by other accounts it was a joyride. IBM in turn came back to Gates, who had a friend of a friend who was cloning CP/M for the 8086, so Microsoft bought the clone for $50,000, cleaned it up a little, and delivered it to IBM while turning a huge profit. Bill Gates became Bill Gates, and Kildall and his company, Digital Research, slowly faded away.

The victors usually get to write the history. I’ve tried several times over the years to find Kildall’s side of the story. I first went looking sometime in 1996 or so, for a feature story about Internet misinformation I wrote for the Columbia Missourian‘s Sunday magazine. For some reason, every five years or so I end up chasing the story down again.
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The CP/M-DOS forensics don’t prove much

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , ,

I saw the headline on Slashdot: Forensic evidence trying to prove whether MS-DOS contained code lifted from CP/M. That got my attention, as the connection between MS-DOS and its predecessor, CP/M, is one of the great unsolved mysteries of computing.

Unfortunately, the forensic evidence doesn’t prove a lot.

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Somehow I started it

Dave Farquhar St. Louis

Friday night, my wife and I attended a baseball game with several of my new coworkers and their families. We rode Metrolink–St. Louis’ light-rail train–to the stadium to avoid traffic. The ride to the stadium was peaceful and relaxing. The ride from the stadium was peaceful and relaxing too, except for a brief interruption between the second and third stops.

It started with an obscene gesture and a lewd request, stated loudly. I assume he was hitting on a female rider sitting in front of him, though I don’t know who it would have been, since all of the female riders on the train appeared to be riding with their husbands or boyfriends. This action predictably failed to win him any affection, or even much attention, from any of the female riders, though several of the male riders took notice. Read more

The best free e-book site I’ve found yet

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , ,

I’ve been grabbing Project Gutenberg texts as I think of them, and prettying them up with an epub editor, but I learned today that I’ve been largely wasting my time. Manybooks.net is a site that has most of the Gutenberg collection available and has already cleaned up the formatting and added covers to make these old public domain books look better and more recognizable on an e-reader’s virtual “shelf.”

That’s not the only thing the site has going for it.

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Windows 8 comes out later this year, but I won’t be moving just yet

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

So Windows 8 was released today. I won’t be moving to it anytime soon.

There are some people who make a habit of waiting for Service Pack 1 to be released before upgrading to a new version of Windows. The trouble is, I can think of one instance, Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 1, that was much more problematic than its predecessor. And in more recent years, service packs have become more arbitrary. Knowing that practice exists, Microsoft releases Service Pack 1 based more on uptake than on actual need.

So I have a different rule I follow. Read more