The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates 458
theodp writes "BusinessWeek discusses They Made America, a new book which claims Bill Gates got the rewards due Gary Kildall. The book attacks the reputations of key early PC era players - Gates, IBM, and QDOS programmer Tim Paterson - asserting that Paterson copied parts of Kildall's CP/M and that IBM tricked Kildall, allowing Gates to prevail and depriving Kildall of untold riches and credit for a seminal role in the PC revolution. Some material came from an unpublished memoir penned by Kildall after the University of Washington, where Kildall earned a PhD, picked Harvard dropout Gates as keynote speaker for the 25th anniversary of its CS program."
Memory lane.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I still have my boxed copies of CP/M-86, DR-C and DR-Fortran at home. Having used CP/M on an Apple ][+ with a Z80 card it was a pretty easy transition. To this day I still use Joe [sourceforge.net] as my editor. It's a virtual clone of WordStar that I used on the CP/M machine 20 years ago.
Too bad DOS and MS won out, CP/M was the cat's meow at the time.
Bil Gates... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure we've all had experiences of people telling us how clever Bill Gates is inventing Windows, or the Internet or whatever.
The real shame is that certain computer museums in the USA perpetuate the myth that the manufacturers of software like Bill Gates were actually the inventors of it. I also think that Steve Jobs is a cool guy but doesn't deserve much space in the history of computing. Commercialising and inventing are completely different things.
No big surprise... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't say I'm surprised to hear that Bill Gates wasn't the innovative programmer he's made out to be, but then we already knew that. His strengths have always been elsewhere, mainly in the form of making some pretty good business decisions. Because of that, this Kildall really couldn't have been Bill Gates - he obviously lacks the business sense.
I do find the assertion that it was all a conspiracy with IBM laughable, though. First, why would IBM care? Second, if IBM had a clue about the future value of DOS back then, they would have bought it outright rather than choosing to license it.
Re:Not entirely untold (Score:5, Interesting)
The book was made into a movie [imdb.com] a few years ago, which I believe aired on TNT (if memory serves). I see it is now also available on video.
Re:Memory lane.... (Score:3, Interesting)
My mother is a business studies teacher. Back in the 80's they used to have Amstrad PCW word processors in the classrooms for teaching word processing and spreadsheets. They were 4MHz Z80 machines with a single 3" floppy (180k) disk, 256k RAM and a proprietary cheap and nasty dot-matrix printer. They had monochrome bitmapped green screens. They ran CP/M 2.2 (IIRC) and came with Locomotive BASIC. One Saturday afternoon I hacked up a little Z80 disassembler in BASIC which followed jumps and calls/returns. Great fun. The teacher got a 512k model with dual disk drives :-)
Wait a second... (Score:2, Interesting)
"Kildall's then-wife, Dorothy McEwen, the company's business manager, refused to sign their nondisclosure agreement. She is now ill with brain cancer and can't remember the events, according to daughter Kristin Kildall."
Do we see a trend here?
Re:Bil Gates... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes I do.
Jobs is brilliant at making great products, about understanding what will work commercially, etc. He'll look at something and say, hey, that's cool, we can do something with that. He's great at that. But that's different to inventing technology.
Re:Bil Gates... (Score:5, Interesting)
But is it as worthy of our admiration?
Re:Wrong person (Score:5, Interesting)
Paul Allen was pretty much the brains and the charm behind getting Dos into the PC. Bill was just his friend.
IMHO: He got lucky.
Re:Bil Gates... (Score:3, Interesting)
Heh, that's a better reply than the geek rage I was expecting... I'm afraid I don't know the answer, though.
I do know that people with bright ideas come and go but those with the huge persistence and blind arrogance required to forge a new business area are rare and valuable.
Re:Trusting IBM (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people like it because if IBM likes the idea they'll throw IBM resourses at it and let you develop it and pay you to do it.
They give you a lot of resourses to get your idea off the ground and will reward you if its a successful product. If its credit your looking for do it yourself.
They even tell the interns, if you have an idea and you want to develop it DON"t tell it to us.
Don't forget Novell (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't the NDA thing a myth? (Score:3, Interesting)
So I recall hearing somewhere...
The book is a good read for nerds (Score:5, Interesting)
In my 30 years of programming, many of them at startups, I know of nothing to compare to the myriad drained lives, burnt hopes and stolen thunder that bob and sink in the wake of Mr. Gates. Larry Ellison may be a runner up to Gates in this grim category but that is usually how those two fare in their competition. For every millionaire Gates made, there was a company out there that had a good idea and smart people who still couldn't grow in the shade of Microsoft. To name names would rub salt in the wounds of some good friends...lets just say having a great idea and a willingness to work hard are not enough to insure success. The lucky ones were assimilated.
Re:Kildall dropped the ball. (Score:3, Interesting)
Gates didn't win because he was a better businessman, unless being a "better businessman" means being an ammoral, back-stabbing thief.
I think I just answered my own question.
Re:Wrong person (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Memory lane.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Digital Research never made applications. They believed that they should only make OSs and programing tools. I often wish Microsoft would have adopted that model as well.
Bill Gates was a dumpster diver (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quoteth a former president (Score:5, Interesting)
Persistence without talent, education, or genius, on the other hand, generally leads to the kind of fame that most of us would rather avoid. It's the single driving quality of that leechlike salesman you'd love to punch in the nose, or the lunatic-fringe politician who just won't go away even though he never comes within 1/100 of winning. It's the life and breath of tin-pot dictators and fanatics.
I agree with Cal's observations but not his conclusion. Persistence and determination can accomplish nothing worthwhile if you have no idea what you are doing.
Re:So Basically (Score:3, Interesting)
There is also evidence to suggest that Microsoft were following similar practices many years before the DoJ case. See also "The Microsoft File: The Secret Case against Bill Gates" [amazon.com]
Re:Memory lane.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Funnily enough I used to like the FCBS when I started writing in assembly under DOS 3.3.
They allowed you to do globbing via FindfirstFile, and FindNextFile, (or whatever they were called!).
This was much simpler than using other functions - because the space inside the PSP was already setup for them.
Re:The Parasitic Sub-Society of The Elites (Score:1, Interesting)
Then I knew a tech analyst in NYC who heard from one of Gates' #2s that, as Bill's mother was in her final, fatal illness, she asked him to please settle down and marry (evidently there were employees charged with procuring short-term bed companions for him). So he put together portfolios on four candidates, and his mom chose Melissa for him.
Ah, mothers!
Re:Wrong person (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, poor guy. He had ethics.
Are you suggesting that is impossible to be both ethical, and a successful businessperson? What about co-ops? Google? Saturn? If you'd RTFA, you'd see that in this case, "doing what was needed to win" consisted of "delivering a 16-bit version of your OS by next summer." Kildall couldn't/didn't. Gates did. So the contract went to Gates. Where does ethics enter into this? Gates had vision where Kildall didn't. This has nothing to do with ethics.
Photo I took of Tim Paterson Rallying (Score:2, Interesting)
Tim Paterson [kennethjames.com]
Gates *was* a real programmer (Score:0, Interesting)
I started with computers around 1978-9 with the Radio Shack TRS-80. I began with BASIC but progressed to Z-80 assembly language. At one point I disassembled and studied the 12K Level II BASIC ROM, written in Z-80. 12 kilobytes of Z80 assembly is not a lot of space for a reasonably sophisticated (circa 1979) language interpreter so some clever hacks were employed. One that still sticks with me was the error code section. The routine that looked up the 2 letter error code used the contents of the 8 bit E register. But if you looked at the section preceding that routine, there were mostly a series of 3 byte instructions, a 16 bit LD BC,nnnn (BC being the 16 bit concatenation of the 8 bit B and C registers), one after the other. This was very puzzling at first but then I noticed that the jumps to print the error code were *within* those instructions. It turned out that the operand, nnnn, was itself an instruction: LD E,err ! Dropping down after that were LD BC instructions that did not alter the contents of E, which eliminated the need to have many jump instructions and hence conserving the precious 12K resource.
From my understanding it is likely that Gates worked on that code, given that it originated as a Microsoft product and that he was still coding at that time. If so, it is obvious that he was not just a great businessman but a superlative "hacker" as well.
Re:Free Stuff (Score:2, Interesting)
I ask because that's my previous experience with "free" tools from Microsoft. (too lazy to read through the EULA)
Re:The Parasitic Sub-Society of The Elites (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think it was a class thing. I think it was more of an east-coast/west-coast thing, or a new-industry/old-industry thing. Digital Research was at one time called Intergalactic Digital Research. The culture there was very casual. When I worked there, they had beer parties every Friday afternoon, and people walked around in their socks. IBM was famously buttoned down, and, e.g., there are stories about IBMers being sent home from work because they wore blue socks instead of black ones. I think a thread running through the legends, which probably represents some truth, is that Kildall and his wife took a little bit more of an arrogant attitude with IBM than they should have, possibly because at that time DRI was a big player in the microcomputer industry, and IBM wasn't.
I would like to see exactly how he was tricked. (Score:1, Interesting)
From what I have heard of the situation the IBM people bent over backwards when approaching Kildall.
Even if Kildall did end up providing them with the operating system is it highly unlikely he would have had the smarts to include a non-exclusivity clause to sell his OS to other companies.
If Kildall did end up making the operating system IBM would have gotten the lions share of the profits instead. This is due to the fact that it would have been signifigantly more difficult for the clone computers to be made.
Really love him or hate him the openness of the PC architecture can really be traced back to the moment when Gates signed his deal with IBM.
Re:Bill Gates is a Criminal--wooo-weee (Score:2, Interesting)
If only there could be a retroactive suit to go back and put a cap in ms' corrupt corporate ass.
This kind of information, if made required reading, could put one HELL of a dent in ms' filthy image.
Would it be safe, legally, to put this knowledge into a GNU/GPL file and deliver it onto websites or onto Linux disks and other media? I know it's not good to deliver scathing commentary or facts about a ruthless, cutthroat, vile, filthy, uncouth, deserving-to-be-strangled-asshole-company, but sometimes...
David Syes
Re:Wrong person.. then add to the list of offenses (Score:2, Interesting)
Trickery-dickery
It's too bad Apples own lawyers MISSED that. It's a height of folly for a lawyer to miss injected specfics that are an attempt to "minefield" a contract into oblivion.
Gotta be careful with those "version #" and "any version" clauses.
It's this kind of tricky-dick stuff that mires musicians and novelists, especially the publishing houses that CLAIM to be PROTECTING themselves when they demand the author submits to the publisher's ownership/control:
--all drafts,
--sketches
--blueprints
--models
--di
--plans
--audio/visual recordings
--notes
and other nouns. They are not just doing due diligene to ward off complaints or suits, you know. They are trying to hem up the author who two years into a 3-year contract starts negotiations with another publishers. If said author surrenders ALL that material, other than the manuscript itself, said author most likely is SCREWED, and even unable to present that non-selling, non-performing material to a new suitor.
Capitalism and business law at its best.
That is why, as an aspiring author and as an artist NONE of my drawings or works leave my ownership. Anybody wanting to play the game with ME is only getting a non-exclusive license for a limited period of time in which to ATTEMPT to make a buck. By no means do they acquire and blocking or obstructing rights to hem me in. If I can create drawings, then they can go make their own if they want control over drawings.
Authors, whether of software, books, drawings, or what-nots MUST become non-conformists and use everthing at their dispose, from copyright, to copyleft, to creative commons, to GPL/LGPL/ and more. SOME RIGHTS reserved is better that ALL RIGHTS surrendered.
David Syes
of course there are (Score:3, Interesting)
Slack moderators don't concentrate on modding up more than down. Slack moderators also don't browse at -1, but +2, so by the time your posting becomes visible the good moderators start to leave off and the bad ones knock it back down again.
And of course, in a crowd the size of the slashdot crowd there is room for any number of moderator conspiracies to co-exist, no doubt there is more than one of the type you mentioned.
its the same sort of behaviour that swings online polls widely as the two extreme opposing camps canvas their friends and set up vote spoofers whenthey start to loose.
The answer is to meta-moderate.
It doesn't neccessarily mean that the bad moderators lose mod points in future but it does help make sure that the sort of moderators slashdot has are the sort of moderators it's readers appreciate.
Sam
Re:Jerk, yes; criminal, no. (Score:1, Interesting)