Gary KIldall

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I haven’t yet read Walter Isaacson’s new Silicon Valley history, The Innovators, but I would be indebted if it answers the question of how much Gary Kildall’s software was instrumental to Microsoft’s rise. Was Bill Gates and Paul Allen’s immense success built on intellectual thievery? Has the story been mythologized beyond realistic proportion? An excerpt from Brendan Koerner’s New York Times review of the book:

“The digital revolution germinated not only at button-down Silicon Valley firms like Fairchild, but also in the hippie enclaves up the road in San Francisco. The intellectually curious denizens of these communities ‘shared a resistance to power elites and a desire to control their own access to information.’ Their freewheeling culture would give rise to the personal computer, the laptop and the concept of the Internet as a tool for the Everyman rather than scientists. Though Isaacson is clearly fond of these unconventional souls, his description of their world suffers from a certain anthropological detachment. Perhaps because he’s accustomed to writing biographies of men who operated inside the corridors of power — Benjamin Franklin, Henry ­Kissinger, Jobs — Isaacson seems a bit baffled by committed outsiders like ­Stewart Brand, an LSD-inspired futurist who predicted the democratization of computing. He also does himself no favors by frequently citing the work of John Markoff and Tom Wolfe, two writers who have produced far more intimate portraits of ’60s ­counterculture.

Yet this minor shortcoming is quickly forgiven when The Innovators segues into its rollicking last act, in which hardware becomes commoditized and software goes on the ascent. The star here is Bill Gates, whom Isaacson depicts as something close to a punk — a spoiled brat and compulsive gambler who ‘was rebellious just for the hell of it.’ Like Paul Baran before him, Gates encountered an appalling lack of vision in the corporate realm — in his case at IBM, which failed to realize that its flagship personal computer would be cloned into oblivion if the company permitted Microsoft to license the machine’s MS-DOS operating system at will. Gates pounced on this mistake with a feral zeal that belies his current image as a sweater-clad humanitarian.”

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Steve Ditlea, who wrote the 1981 Inc report about Apple Computers banishing typewriters from its offices, published a piece in the same publication the following year about the birth of the software industry. One of the players he mentions was Gary Kildall, a star-crossed software pioneer who was elbowed aside by Microsoft and died young after some sort of mysterious injury suffered in a biker bar in Monterrey. An excerpt from Ditlea’s article, when Kildall and others were trying to code the future:

“In 1976, Bill Gates, then 20, and Paul Allen, 23, were running a company they had started the year before in Gates’s college dorm in Boston. That same year, Gary Kildall, 34 was starting a company in his backyard toolshed in California. Tony Gold, 30, was still a credit officer at a New York City bank. Dan Fylstra, 25, was starting at the Harvard Business School. Dan Bricklin, 25, was getting ready to apply to business schools in Massachusetts, and Bob Frankston, 27, was working as a computer programmer near Boston.

All seven of these people started and now run companies that produce and/or publish software for personal computers. All five of their companies — whose combined revenues just missed $50 million in 1981 — are doubling or tripling in size each year. All of these entrepreneurs are, or soon will be, millionaires. All are likely to be the leaders of the personal-computer software industry — quoted during economic crisis, looked up to by future business-school students.

The five companies they founded have created a new industry from scratch. And now they’ve been joined by as many as 1,000 more companies offering for sale some 5,000 software programs. The pressures to stay on top in the industry are intense. Some of the biggest companies in the country have turned their attention to micro software in recent months. Professional investors are scrambling to pour millions of dollars of venture capital into the leading companies. And the independents — only a dozen or so had sales of more than $1 million in 1981 — are straining to stay out in front.

‘It’s a tremendous business to be part of,’ says Mike Belling, 32, who bought the three-month-old Stoneware Inc. in June 1980 with his partner, Kenneth Klein, 42. ‘But it has its pitfalls, like cars used to. It’s all so brand new that there’s nothing to go by yet. There’s no history to tell you how many copies of a program to produce, for instance.’

Five years ago, the micro-software industry didn’t exist.”•

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It seems the surest way to announce that your company, products and employees lack genius is to rely heavily on market research and focus groups. What you’re basically saying is that you know you can’t be ahead of the curve so you’d like someone else to help you just keep up. When Steve Jobs was working on the iPad and wanted to rely on touch screens rather than a stylus, his judgement was questioned, particularly because he didn’t do any market research. His response was: “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want,” realizing on his own that moving from mouse to stylus wasn’t a bold step into the future. And I think most great things have been created by one or two people who just knew. There aren’t enough of those people to go around, so we get focus groups instead. (George Lois agrees with me.)

Jobs obviously wasn’t the first one attempt popularizing touch-screen. In the 1983 edition of Computer Chronicles below, Hewlett-Packard reps share their own touch-screen technology. I wonder what market research said about it back then. By the way: The younger host on your right is Gary Kildall.

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Star-crossed computer pioneer Gary Kildall spent years trying to dissuade people from feeling sorry for him, but he eventually came to see their point. The Seattle native was a genius who was toting around a portable PC of his own creation as far back as the early 1970s. He understood the power of the microprocessor before pretty much anyone else and created CP/M, the first modern operating system, also in the ’70s.

But even though Kildall’s company DRI (Digital Research, Inc.) made him a good deal of money, he would be elbowed aside in 1980 by Bill Gates’ knockoff version of CP/M called MS-DOS. And Kildall’s time at the center of the computer business was over just like that, though he tried to take it in stride.

The computer scientist was eventually worn down by years of being compared unfavorably to Gates and wrote his memoirs to try to correct his footnote status in an industry that owed him much better. Kildall’s life went from tortured to tragic in 1994, when he died at 52 from a blood clot in his brain after being the victim of some sort of shadowy violence in a biker bar in Monterrey.

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From 1995:

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