Gary Kildall

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Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Like most of the early significant programs, it originated out of one person’s initiative. Gary Kildall In mid-1972, Gary Kildall came across an advertisement on a bulletin board that said “MICROCOMPUTER $25.” The item advertised, the Intel 4004, was actually a microprocessor, arguably the first in the world, but it still sounded like a real bargain to Kildall. He decided to buy one. Although many of the microcomputer companies’ founders didn’t fit the typical image of an industry leader, Gary Kildall didn’t even act as if he wanted to be in the game. While wrapping up his PhD at the University of Washington, Kildall had moved to Pacific Grove, California.

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They were also, although no one used this term at the time, microcomputers. One of the first people to begin developing these programs was a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School located down the coast from Silicon Valley, in Pacific Grove, California. Like Osborne, Gary Kildall would be an important figure in the development of the personal computer. * * * Figure 13. Gary Kildall Kildall wrote the first programming language for Intel’s 4004 microprocessor, as well as a control program that he would later turn into the personal-computer industry’s most popular operating system. (Courtesy of Tom G. O’Neal) In late 1972, Kildall already had written a simple language for the 4004—a program that translated cryptic commands into the more cryptic ones and zeroes that formed the internal instruction set of the microprocessor.

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Eubanks thoroughly enjoyed his work on a nuclear-powered, fast-attack Navy submarine. His friend, software designer Alan Cooper, summed it up: “Gordon thrives on tension.” * * * Figure 40. Gordon Eubanks Eubanks’s master’s thesis under Gary Kildall became one of the early industry’s standard programming languages. (Courtesy of Digital Research) Gordon also liked to work hard. When he arrived at the Naval Postgraduate School, he soon heard about a professor named Gary Kildall who was teaching compiler theory. Everybody said Kildall was the toughest instructor, so maybe he’d learn something, Eubanks thought. For Eubanks, the hard work in Kildall’s class paid off.

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

The market for kit computers for hobbyists was very limited. With many competitors entering the field, MITS and IMS soon began to lose market share and eventually went out of business. However, a number of individuals who developed software for these machines—including Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Gary Kildall—were to get a first-mover advantage that would give them early dominance of the personal computer software industry. The transforming event for the personal computer was the launch of the Apple II in April 1977. The tiny firm of Apple Computer had been formed by the computer hobbyists Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976.

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At this time Microsoft was almost exclusively a supplier of programming languages to the microcomputer industry through OEM channels.7 Although it had competitors, all of them tiny startups, none was nearly as successful in this niche. But Microsoft was little known outside the industry, and it would be several years before the firm was perceived as a maker of consumer software. 206 Chapter 7 Operating Systems The first vendor of microcomputer operating systems was Digital Research, founded in 1976 by Gary Kildall (1942–1994).8 In 1972, when the Intel microprocessor first came to his attention, Kildall was a computer science instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Kildall, with a PhD in computer science, got interested in the challenge of programming the new devices and became a consultant to Intel, producing PL/M, a well-regarded programming language for the Intel 8008 microprocessor.

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Rubenstein had briefly been marketing director of IMS, manufacturer of the IMSAI 8080 microcomputer, and from that vantage point he had observed the growing personal computer software industry and the emergence of retail computer stores as a distribution channel. Having negotiated a CP/M license with Gary Kildall’s Digital Research while with IMS, he saw the significance of using the CP/M platform to broaden the potential customer base of a software product. MicroPro began as a two-person operation, consisting of Rubenstein and a former IMS programmer, Rob Barnaby. Its first product was a rudimentary text processing system called WordMaster.

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

For the first few years, Microsoft was a relatively small, aggressive technology company with several dozen employees – one of a number of such companies working in the emerging field of desktop computers. At this point, these were fairly primitive machines and hard to operate, and the market for them, while growing, was still limited. Gates was successful in the field, but not a leading figure. He was certainly far behind Gary Kildall, a brilliant computer innovator thirteen years his senior who had already developed an operating system, known as Control Program for Microcomputers or CP/M, which was the most widely used operating system for desktops at the time. Kildall’s company, Digital Research, had sold hundreds of thousands of copies of CP/M, and was pulling in revenue of more than $100,000 a month.

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Project leader Don Estridge told Gates that the new IBM chief executive, John Opel, was delighted to hear that the company might be doing a deal with Gates, whose mother he knew personally. (Opel sat on the board of the United Way NGO with Mary Gates.) Bill and his mother certainly fitted much more comfortably into the upscale corporate culture of IBM than the hippie-like and free-spirited Gary Kildall. In the end, IBM did a deal with Gates – even though Kildall’s system was clearly superior. Indeed, Kildall, who was years ahead of everyone else in the field, had already developed the capacity for multitasking – a function that it would take another decade for IBM and Microsoft to come out with.

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According to Evans, Kildall was ‘the true founder of the personal computer revolution and ‌the father of PC software’.2 But, of course, it was Gates who was to get the credit, and in the process become one of the world’s most famous and celebrated men – and the richest person on the planet. • • • But does he deserve that fortune? Although Gates was a go-getter who maximized every opportunity that came his way, he wasn’t the actual inventor of the operating system of the personal computer, as he’s often celebrated for being. If anyone deserves that title, it’s Gary Kildall. Of course, this is by no means the first time an actual inventor has been nudged aside by a rival who was simply more adept at manoeuvring himself to the front of the line. The history of inventions is full of such stories. But the point isn’t that Kildall should have ended up with $50 billion (in fact, Kildall, although not in the same league as Gates, did do very well financially).

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Atul Gawande, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, commoditize, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Emanuel Derman, fundamental attribution error, Gary Kildall, Gini coefficient, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, income inequality, Innovator's Dilemma, John Bogle, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Menlo Park, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, power law, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Simon Singh, six sigma, Steven Pinker, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipf's Law

He left under his own power but died three days later from the injury, complicated by his chronic alcoholism. He was fifty-two years old. He is buried in Seattle and has an etching of a floppy disk on his tombstone. His name is Gary Kildall.3 You'd be excused for thinking that the first part of the story is about Bill Gates, the multibillionaire founder of Microsoft. And it is certainly tantalizing to ask whether Gary Kildall could have been Bill Gates, who at one point was the world's richest man. But the fact is that Bill Gates made astute decisions that positioned Microsoft to prevail over Kildall's company, Digital Research, at crucial moments in the development of the PC industry.

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The term comes from the acronym “SABR,” which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. I use the term more generally to reflect the study of all sports through statistics. 8. Richard A. Epstein, The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, rev. ed. (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1977), xv. Chapter 1—Skill, Luck, and Three Easy Lessons 1. Jeffrey Young, “Gary Kildall: The DOS That Wasn't,” Forbes, July 7, 1997. 2. Harold Evans, They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004), 402–417. 3. Peyton Whitely, “Computer Pioneer's Death Probed—Kildall Called Possible Victim of Homicide,” Seattle Times, July 16, 1994. 4.

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Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Yarrow, Kielan, Peter Brown, and John W. Krakauer. “Inside the Brain of an Elite Athlete: The Neural Processes that Support High Achievement in Sports.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10 (August 2009): 585–596. Young, Jeffrey, “Gary Kildall: The DOS That Wasn't.” Forbes, July 7, 1997. Young, S. Stanley, Heejung Bang, and Kutluk Oktay. “Cereal-Induced Gender Selection? Most Likely Multiple Testing False Positive.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 276, no. 1660 (April 7, 2009): 1211–1212. Ziliak, Stephen T., and Deirdre N. McCloskey.

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, attribution theory, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, experimental subject, framing effect, full employment, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, hindsight bias, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, low interest rates, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, selection bias, side project, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, ultimatum game, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, winner-take-all economy

A key step in its transition from a small tech start-up was when IBM approached Gates in 1980 to ask whether Microsoft could help create an operating system for the new personal computer it was developing. Gates was originally reluctant to take on the project and suggested that IBM contact Digital Research, another small Seattle software firm that had already developed a personal computer operating system called CP/M. IBM spoke with Digital Research’s founder, Gary Kildall, who expressed interest. Accounts differ as to how events unfolded after that meeting, but what’s clear is that IBM and DR failed to reach an agreement on the sale of CP/M.13 Jack Sams, the IBM negotiator in charge of procuring an operating system, later mentioned to Bill Gates that IBM was considering the possibility of acquiring QDOS, the so-called “quick and dirty operating system” written by Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products.

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In short, most of us would never have heard of Microsoft if any one of a long sequence of improbable events had not occurred. If Bill Gates had been born in 1945 rather than 1955, if his high school had not had a computer club with one of the first terminals that could offer instant feedback, if IBM had reached an agreement with Gary Kildall’s Digital Research, or if Tim Paterson had been a more experienced negotiator, Gates almost certainly never would have succeeded on such a grand scale. Sometimes, even seemingly unlucky starts turn out to make long-run success more likely. Gladwell cites the experience of Jews who immigrated to New York in the early twentieth century and went on to prosper in the garment industry.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

Although IBM was the world’s largest software developer, paradoxically it did not have the skills to develop software for personal computers. Its bureaucratic software-development procedures were slow and methodical, and geared toward large software artifacts; the company lacked the critical skills needed to develop the “quick-and-dirty” software needed for personal computers. IBM initially approached Gary Kildall of Digital Research—the developer of the CP/M operating system—for operating software for the new computer, and herein lies one of the more poignant stories in the history of the personal computer. For reasons now muddied, Kildall blew the opportunity. One version of the story has it that he refused to sign IBM’s nondisclosure agreement, while another version has him doing some recreational flying while the dark-suited IBMers cooled their heels below.

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Second, there was a strategic problem in working around the existing MS-DOS operating system; one had to either replace MS-DOS entirely with a new operating system or else place the new operating system on top of the old, providing a second layer of software between the user’s applications and the hardware. In the first case, one would no longer be able to use the thousands of existing software applications; but in the second case, one would have an inherent inefficiency. Perhaps the company with the strongest motive for developing a GUI-based operating system was Gary Kildall’s Digital Research, the original developer of CP/M, the operating system used on 8-bit microcomputers. It was estimated that 200 million copies of CP/M were eventually sold. As noted in the previous chapter, Kildall’s Digital Research failed to obtain the contract to develop the IBM PC operating system, in favor of Gates’s Microsoft.

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Although CD-ROM drives were expensive upon their introduction, costing $1,000 or more for several years, their huge capacity gave them the potential to create an entirely new market for computer-enabled content that the embryonic computer networks would not be able to satisfy for another fifteen years. As long as the price of a CD-ROM drive remained around $1,000, its use was limited to corporations and libraries, mainly for business information and high-value publications. In the consumer arena, two of the industry leaders in personal-computer software, Gary Kildall and Bill Gates, played critical roles in establishing a market for CD-ROM media. Both Kildall and Gates hit on the idea of the CD-ROM encyclopedia as the means to establish the home market for CD-ROMs. Kildall explained: “Everyone knows encyclopedias usually cost about $1,000. Someone can rationalize buying a computer that has the encyclopedia, if it’s in the same price range as the printed encyclopedia.”

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

While never achieving the fame of Bill Gates, he continued to make and market CP/M, and became a familiar face on public television as the host of The Computer Chronicles before his untimely death at age 52, in 1994. Gary Kildall, Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the History of the Personal Computer Industry, unpublished manuscript in the possession of Scott and Kristen Kildall, reproduced online with permission by the Computer History Museum at http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/in-his-own-words-gary-kildall/, archived at https://perma.cc/NU3B-M47B. 6. Rinearson, “Young Students.” 7. Burt McMurtry, interview with the author, January 15, 2015; Leena Rao, “Sand Hill Road’s Consiglieres: August Capital,” TechCrunch, June 14, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/14/sand-hill-roads-consiglieres-august-capital/, archived at https://perma.cc/6DN4-DERQ. 8.

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Big Blue was interested in Microsoft’s whole line of computer languages, and it also wanted Gates’s help in finding the right operating system for it. In a chain of events that ultimately became legendary in computer circles (and whose disputed details became another proof point for Silicon Valley’s later dislike of all things Microsoft), the IBM team tried and failed to make a deal with California-based developer Gary Kildall, designer of the operating system, CP/M, that seemed poised to become the market standard. As the whole plan teetered, Gates swooped in, adapting an OS from another Seattle-based company into something he called MS-DOS. Kildall called it a clone of CP/M. Many years and lawsuits later, Kildall struck his own deal with IBM for his operating system, but by that time Microsoft had cemented its lock on the IBM personal-computer universe.

Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM by Paul Carroll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, Gary Kildall, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, popular electronics, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, thinkpad, traveling salesman

Gates figured he could make plenty of money from developing and selling the languages, and he had an implicit understanding with DRI: They would stay off his language tu rf if he avoided their operating-system arena. Gates called D RI for Sams and set up an appointm ent for the IBM delegation for the next day in Pacific Grove, California, just off scenic Highway 1, which snakes along the coast. But Gary Kildall, the president of D RI, com m itted a gaffe of epic proportions. The Ph.D. in com puter science was feeling cocky, so when IBM came calling in 1980 with the business opportunity of his lifetime, he was off flying his new plane. His wife, a lawyer, was left to deal with IBM and its layers of restrictive nondisclosure agreements.

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This person was in jail for phone fraud, having taken advantage of the fact that the whistles being given out in C ap’n Crunch cereal in those days could be used to generate free long-distance calls just by blowing it into the receiver of a phone.4) W hen the Charlie BIG BLUES 41 Chaplin Tram p character began to be used in IBM ’s ads as the symbol for its PC in late 1981, the mainframe types around IBM sometimes derided the PC software as “Charlie Chaplin applications,” but W ren’s applications did the trick. H er little business soon generated $100 million of revenue a year and helped entice people to buy the PC hardware. At the last minute, Gary Kildall and Digital Research Intergalactic resurfaced with a complaint that threatened to derail the software plan. H e had decided that the QDOS that Microsoft had acquired was a ripoff of his CP/M operating system, and he was making noises about suing Microsoft and IBM for using that as the basis for DOS.

Toast by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, Buckminster Fuller, cosmological principle, dark matter, disinformation, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, flag carrier, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, hydroponic farming, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Khyber Pass, launch on warning, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, NP-complete, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, performance metric, phenotype, plutocrats, punch-card reader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, speech recognition, strong AI, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, Y2K

Someone came up with a beauty; a one-line change in the 1971 anti-trust ruling against AT&T that leaves them the right to sell software. UNIX dead by 1978, strangled by expensive licenses and no source code for universities; C and C++ non-starters: the future as VMS. Another change left me shaking my head: five miles per hour on a cross-wind. Gary Kildall didn’t go flying that crucial day, was at the office when IBM came calling in 1982 and sold them CP/M for their PC’s. By Y2K Microsoft had a reputation for technical excellence, selling their commercial UNIX-95 system as a high-end server system. (In this one, Bill Gates still lives in the USA.)

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, feminist movement, forensic accounting, Gary Kildall, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, index fund, Isaac Newton, law of one price, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pepto Bismol, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

In August 1980, when a group of IBM employees working on a secret project to build a personal computer flew to Seattle to meet with the young computer entrepreneur, Bill Gates was running a small company and IBM needed a program, called an operating system, for its planned “home computer.” Recollections of the ensuing events vary, but the gist goes like this:12 Gates said he couldn’t provide the operating system and referred the IBM people to a famed programmer named Gary Kildall at Digital Research Inc. The talks between IBM and Kildall did not go well. For one thing, when IBM showed up at DRI’s offices, Kildall’s then wife, the company’s business manager, refused to sign IBM’s nondisclosure agreement. The IBM emissaries called again, and that time Kildall did meet with them.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deliberate practice, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, smart grid, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy

The sequence of events that made that future possible began when IBM approached Microsoft to inquire about developing an operating system for the personal computer it was planning to introduce. As Leonard Mlodinow recounts the story in a 1990 book, Gates initially told IBM that Microsoft couldn’t take on the project.6 He suggested that IBM instead contact Gary Kildall, whose firm, Digital Research, had already developed a personal computer operating system called CP/M. But Kildall’s wife, who managed Digital Research, was reluctant to sign the nondisclosure agreement that IBM required, so those talks broke off. Jack Sams of IBM then went back to Gates to discuss other possibilities.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Gates said he had a local guy, Tim Patterson, working on the programming. It would allow users to open, navigate, and manipulate files on their computer. The discussion continued for another hour, and the two agreed to meet again within two weeks. Morby didn’t get the Microsoft deal, but after her meeting with Gates, she met with computer scientist Gary Kildall, who had written the very first operating system, CP/M (for Control Program/Monitor), to connect computers. Kildall wrote the software from scratch, beating Microsoft to the market. His company was Digital Research, Inc. Sonja continued, “Jacqui and Kildall actually sat in a restaurant called the Buckhorn Barbecue near the Nut Tree complex, and Kildall grabbed a bunch of napkins and began to draw a diagram.”

Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Small, often imperceptible differences in quality separate the best from the rest. As a result, luck matters for success more than ever. Releasing the right record at the right moment matters critically for success or failure. The same is true in the economy writ large. Bill Gates might have been Bill What’s-his-name if Gary Kildall and Digital Research had agreed to the terms IBM first offered them for developing the operating system for the new personal computer in 1980, before turning to Bill Gates’s fledgling company.17 Success is hard to judge ahead of time, and in no way guaranteed, even for the best performers.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

Flying airplanes is the archetypal programmer's avocation.[2] The cockpit control panel of an airplane is packed with gauges, knobs, and levers, but programmers thrive on these daunting complexities. Homo logicus finds it fun and engaging, despite (because of!) the months of rigorous study required. Homo sapiens would rather ride along as passengers. [2] All right, I confess: I'm a private pilot. Quintessential programmer-nerd Gary Kildall took me flying for the first time in his Piper Archer in 1979, and in that short flight I became hooked. The computer programmer in me loves all of that pointless complexity. For Homo logicus, control is the goal and complexity is the price they will pay for it. For normal humans, simplicity is the goal, and relinquishing control is the price they will pay.

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

Although Microsoft was doing very well with its licensing contracts with these companies, the big prize was IBM, because IBM was coming out with a new line of personal computers and needed an operating system to run on a 16-bit Intel chip. Such an operating system called CP/M had been initially developed by Gary Kildall, a computer engineer, and it was then the fledgling industry standard. The rest of the story is legend. Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products had developed an adapted version of Kildall’s CP/M system, which came to be known as Quick and Dirty Operating System, or QDOS. Paterson leased his system to Microsoft.

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

By the late 1970s the leading operating system in the nascent field of desktop computers was called CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). Microsoft’s main business involved selling software to run on CP/M. Around this time IBM, whose giant presence in the industry was matched by the giant size of its mainframe computers, wanted to launch a desktop and needed an operating system. Not only was CP/M the market leader, its creator Gary Kildall was ahead of his rivals, having already developed multitasking. (If this sounds like another era, it was. Kildall’s company was originally called Intergalactic Digital Research.) However, for reasons which remain obscure, IBM approached Gates rather than Kildall to buy the licence for CP/M. Gates told them it wasn’t his and referred them to Kildall.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Eratosthenes, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Louis Daguerre, millennium bug, Multics, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

But instead of trudging through that long evolutionary process, let's take a look instead at a real operating system and get a feel for what it does and how it works. Historically, the most important operating system for 8-bit microprocessors was CP/M (Control Program for Micros), written in the mid-1970s for the Intel 8080 microprocessor by Gary Kildall (born 1942), who later founded Digital Research Incorporated (DRI). CP/M is stored on a disk. In the early days of CP/M, the most common medium for CP/M was a single-sided 8-inch diskette with 77 tracks, 26 sectors per track, and 128 bytes per sector. (That's a total of 256,256 bytes.) The first two tracks of the disk contain CP/M itself.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

This allowed William Henry Gates III (her son) to score a meeting with IBM about providing a code compiler for IBM’s new, epoch-making product, the IBM PC. What IBM really wanted, though, was an operating system, the core code that manages memory and runs programs. Gates, whose nascent company, Microsoft, didn’t have anything like an entire operating system, honestly referred IBM to a company run by Gary Kildall, a pioneer in operating systems when the real money in computers was still in the hardware. In a story couched in legend, Kildall was off flying his personal plane when IBM representatives physically came knocking at his company’s office. His wife (the company’s business manager) refused to sign IBM’s aggressive nondisclosure agreement and sent them packing, and so IBM grudgingly went back to Gates asking about operating systems.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, Multics, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, value engineering, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

My conversations with them were the backbone of the book, and I would like to thank, in alphabetical order, Arthur Abraham, Roe Adams, Bob Albrecht, Dennis Allison, Larry Bain, Alan Baum, Mike Beeler, Dorothy Bender, Bill Bennett, Chuck Benton, Bob and Carolyn Box, Keith Britton, Lois Britton, Bill Budge, Chuck Bueche, David Bunnell, Doug Carlston, Gary Carlston, Marie Cavin, Mary Ann Cleary, Bob Clements, Tracy Coats, David Crane, Edward Currie, Rick Davidson, Bob Davis, Jack Dennis, Peter Deutsch, Steve Dompier, John Draper, Dan Drew, Mark Duchaineau, Les Earnest, Don Eastlake, Doug Englebart, Chris Espinosa, Lee Felsenstein, LeRoy Finkel, Howard Franklin, Bob Frankston, Ed Fredkin, Gordon French, Martin Garetz, Harry Garland, Richard Garriott, Lou Gary, Bill Gates, Bill Godbout, Vincent Golden, Dave Gordon, Ralph Gorin, Dan Gorlin, Bill Gosper, Richard Greenblatt, Margaret Hamilton, Eric Hammond, John Harris, Brian Harvey, Ted Hoff, Kevin Hunt, Chris Iden, Jerry Jewell, Robert Kahn, David Kidwell, Gary Kildall, Tom Knight, Joanne Koltnow, Alan Kotok, Marc LeBrun, Bob Leff, Mike Levitt, Efrem Lipkin, David Lubar, Olaf Lubeck, John McCarthy, John McKenzie, Robert Maas, Patricia Mariott, Bob Marsh, Roger Melen, Jude Milhon, Marvin Minsky, Fred Moore, Stewart Nelson, Ted Nelson, Jim Nitchals, Russ Noftsker, Kenneth Nussbacher, Rob O’Neal, Peter Olyphant, Adam Osborne, Bill Pearson, Tom Pittman, Larry Press, Malcolm Rayfield, Robert Reiling, Randy Rissman, Ed Roberts, Steve Russell, Peter Samson, Bob Saunders, Warren Schwader, Gil Segal, Vic Sepulveda, David Silver, Dan Sokol, Les Solomon, Marty Spergel, Richard Stallman, Jeff Stephenson, Ivan Strand, Jay Sullivan, Dick Sunderland, Gerry Sussman, Tom Tatum, Dick Taylor, Robert Taylor, Dan Thompson, Al Tommervik, Margot Tommervik, Mark Turmell, Robert Wagner, Jim Warren, Howard Warshaw, Joseph Weizenbaum, Randy Wigginton, John Williams, Ken Williams, Roberta Williams, Terry Winograd, Donald Woods, Steve Wozniak, and Fred Wright.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

An operating system handles the basic instructions that other software uses, including such chores as deciding where data should be stored, how memory and processing resources should be allocated, and how applications software interacts with the computer’s hardware. Microsoft did not yet make an operating system. It was instead working with one called CP/M (for Control Program for Microcomputers) that was owned by Gary Kildall, a childhood friend of Gates who had recently moved to Monterey, California. So with Sams sitting in his office, Gates picked up the phone and called Kildall. “I’m sending some guys down,” he said, describing what the IBM executives were seeking. “Treat them right, they’re important guys.”93 Kildall didn’t.

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

In a broadcast of Computer Chronicles, Tramiel told his hosts, “As far as the Japanese are concerned, I was able to keep those people out of the US market and almost the world market for the past seven years. … What I’m trying to do is come out with the best product, the best quality, and the best price and by doing so, I keep those people out. Thanks to God, I’ve been successful so far.” Co-host Gary Kildall agreed, saying, “The C64 was definitely one of those devices that kept the Japanese machines out.” * * * At any other company, Kit Spencer would have been highly valued after his successful launch of the VIC-20 and C64. “Kit Spencer was key,” says Russell. “He was really an important person.”

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

On the software side, meanwhile, one of the seminal events had come in April 1976, when Dr. Dobbs Journal informed its readers that they could now equip their micros with a real, grown-up operating system for just seventy-five dollars. Known as CP/M-for Control Program for Microcomputers-it had been created by thirty-three-year-old Gary Kildall, a computer-science teacher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. It was quite similar to DECSYSTEM 10, DEC's original software for the PDP-10-indeed, Kildall had carried over many DECSYSTEM features without change, including the use of letters to specify particular disk drives, the use of file names containing a period and a three-letter extension, and the use of commands such as "DIR" to get the contents of a directory.