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: