Fifty years ago this week, PC software pioneer Gary Kildall created “the first commercially successful personal computer operating system in Pacific Grove, California,” according to a blog post from Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum. “We demonstrated CP/M.” This is “how his company, Digital Research Inc., established his CP/M as an industry standard, and then his Microsoft version of CP, which copied the look and feel of the DRI software.” / This is a story about “Was M defeated?”
Killdall served as a CS instructor and later an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California.
He was fascinated by Intel Corporation's first microprocessor chip and simulated its operation on his school's IBM mainframe computer. This work earned him a consulting relationship with Intel to develop PL/M, a high-level programming language that played a key role in establishing the company as a major supplier of chips for personal computers.
To design software tools for Intel's second-generation processors, we needed to connect them to Memorex's new 8-inch floppy disk drive storage unit. He wrote the code for the necessary interface software called CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). But his efforts to build the electronic hardware needed for data transfer failed for a year, and, frustrated, he turned to his college friend John Torode, an electronics engineer who was then teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. He made a “beautiful mouse”. Use wire wrap, board, and cable nesting for the task.
Late one afternoon in the fall of 1974, sitting with John Torode in his backyard workshop at 781 Bayview Avenue in Pacific Grove, Gary “loaded my CP/M program from paper tape onto a diskette, When I removed it from the floppy disk, a prompt appeared: *
[…] The success of booting a computer from a floppy disk drive led to the creation of an operating system that, along with microprocessors and disk drives, provided one of the key building blocks of the personal computer revolution. Intel said no. Gary's interest in his CP/M left him free to utilize the program himself and he sold his first license in 1975.
What happened next? Here are some highlights from the blog posts.
- “Reluctant to adapt the code to a different controller, Gary worked with Glenn Ewing to break out the hardware dependencies and incorporate them into a separate code called BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). You can now run CP/M on new hardware, as permitted by the BIOS code, on compatible microprocessor-based computers from all Intel and other manufacturers. This capability stimulated the rise of an independent software industry.
- “CP/M became accepted as a standard and was offered by most early personal computer vendors, including pioneers Altair, Amstrad, Kaypro, and Osborne…”
- ”[Gary’s company] Years before Apple and Microsoft, they introduced operating systems with windowing and menu-driven user interfaces. But by the mid-1980s, DRI lost ground in the fight against the corporate behemoth created by the joint efforts of IBM and Microsoft. Operating system business. ”
- “Gary sold the company in 1991 to Novell Inc. of Provo, Utah. Eventually, Novell closed its California operations and disposed of its assets in 1996 to Caldera, Inc. used DRI's intellectual property assets to win a lawsuit against Microsoft. ”
