In my mind, Gary Kildall was a genius. Not only for his operating
systems, but he also had PL/I running on PCs when everyone else said it
was impossible. Now, we are stuck with "C".
Also, Kildall had a GUI called GEM out years before Windows.
Unfortunately, the same man that effectively killed that OS/2 and forced
us all to suffer through Win95 and Win98 etc stopped much innovation.
When the IBM PC came out, I used DRI's PL/I when I converted the
mainframe version of Jol to run on the PC. It did pretty much
everything a System Programmer would need to do, far more simply than C
(in my opinion). Unfortunately, it only ran in the 8086 small model and
after Kildall's death with no possibility of a large or flat memory
model, I felt I had no alternative but to convert the Jol code to C,
which took many years. C's inefficient and dangerous string handling
routines took ages to overcome.
With regard to Kildall's flying when IBM went out, some old notes I
looked at the other day place a slightly interpretation on it. Yes,
apparently he was flying in the morning - delivering software to a
customer. He apparently met with IBM in the afternoon but IBM wanted
them to sign a nondisclosure agreement which was very one sided. And it
seems that IBM wanted to pay Kildall a one time payment for his
operating system, instead of the more usual royalty agreement, which was
not seen as acceptable.
And it seems Bill Gates' mother was either on IBM's board, or was was
closely associated with someone who was. One comment from the short
video is:
=====
" What people seem to forget is that Bill Gate's mother worked on the
board of IBM
and Bill Gates Sr. was very well connected. (and was also on the board
of Planned parenthood)
"Bill Gates is also a Rockafeller's grandson..
"so everything was pretty much set up for him to succeed."
=====
Who knows? Is there anyone in IBM who would know the truth?
Here are three videos that go into it in greater depth. "The Man Who
COULD Have Been Bill Gates [Gary Kildall]"
1. A 15 minute video: https://youtu.be/sDIK-C6dGks
2. https://archive.org/details/GaryKild
3. an hour and a half video:
The comments by people who have seen them are very interesting.
Clem Clarke
www.Oscar-Jol.com
Mike Schwab wrote:
The terms of the contract with ALL the computer customers was if he
dropped his price to one vendor, he would have to refund the
difference to all other vendors. And his 8086 was not ready yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall
On Wed, Mar 29, 2023 at 8:03 AM Jay Maynard <jaymayn...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not so sure about Kildall...anyone who snubs a business meeting with
IBM to go flying (a worthy endeavor in and of itself) isn't businessman
enough to compete with Jobs and Gates.
On Wed, Mar 29, 2023 at 3:05 AM Wayne Bickerdike <wayn...@gmail.com> wrote:
Very interesting if one-sided interview. He gives Steve Wozniak very little
credit although Woz really was the inventor and Jobs the salesman in the
partnership.
I read Sculley's autobiography many years ago (From Pepsi to Apple). It
doesn't describe events quite the same way.
Nevertheless, good that it has surfaced at a time where nobody gets sued
for defamation.
After I left IBM in 1979 I wrote some applications on the Apple II. It was
a challenge and from an electrical engineering point of view, it was poor
with a weak power supply that ran the CPU, Floppy drives which caused the
screen to wobble when operating.
At the same time Apple were turning out the IIE, there was a host of other
nicer systems, such as the Cromemco System 3 and Altos 8000 which ran CP/M
and MP/M and had a more robust construction.
It was a shame that Gary Kildall died so young, he would have been a great
competitor for Jobs and Gates.
On Wed, Mar 29, 2023 at 9:28 AM Charles Mills <charl...@mcn.org> wrote:
A friend shared this with me and I thought it was just extraordinary. It
is not "mainframe" but his comments on what happens when the marketeers
run
a tech company will resonate with many of us. It’s a fairly long read.
It’s
a transcript of a long interview done for a TV show – only a few minutes
were actually used – by Bob Cringely, and thought to be lost. Steve Jobs
was at the time (1995) running NeXT, which he was to sell to Apple a
month
later. It is a fascinating read.
https://sameerbajaj.com/jobs/
Charles
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