CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Legacy and Personality of Gary Kildall

  • Many commenters express admiration for Kildall as an inventor, educator, and visionary who viewed computers as learning tools rather than profit engines.
  • Several contrast him with more aggressive business figures in tech, suggesting his distaste for business and marketing hurt his commercial success but made him morally preferable.
  • There’s regret that he isn’t as widely recognized as other “famous computer people,” despite foundational contributions (CP/M, BIOS abstraction, early GUIs like GEM).

CP/M vs MS-DOS and the IBM PC Deal

  • Repeated debate over why CP/M-86 lost to PC‑DOS/MS‑DOS:
    • One side emphasizes CP/M-86’s much higher IBM-set retail price and late delivery, making DOS a “no-brainer.”
    • Others cite an oral history from a DRI executive claiming IBM promised equal footing on price but then undercut CP/M-86 drastically, which Kildall later described as “the day innocence was gone.”
  • Disagreement over who set CP/M-86 pricing: some say IBM simply passed through higher royalty costs; others say DRI misplayed negotiations.
  • Discussion of Tim Paterson’s QDOS/86‑DOS as a CP/M-like stopgap IBM could ship quickly, later adapted into PC‑DOS/MS‑DOS. Timing (licensing vs purchase) is disputed but generally agreed to be very fast.

Gates, Jobs, Elites, and Nepotism

  • Mixed views on Gates: acknowledged as a highly talented programmer and early software entrepreneur, but also portrayed as intensely commercial and sometimes ruthless.
  • Long thread on whether his family connections (especially his mother’s nonprofit board overlap with IBM leadership) materially influenced IBM’s choice of DOS; some see plausible cronyism, others think IBM’s technical and financial vetting dominated.
  • Jobs is compared as a product and taste-driven figure, with both praise (design) and criticism (fanless designs, treatment of early employees).

Memoirs Release, Redactions, and Alcoholism

  • Excitement about the free release, but disappointment that only early chapters are available and that the rest may be withheld for decades.
  • Some argue the family is right to omit personal and alcoholism-related material; others feel posthumous editing distorts the historical record and could have offered valuable cautionary lessons.
  • Speculation that omitted sections concern family conflicts, with recognition that memories and later narratives are often unreliable.

Technical and Historical Side Threads

  • Tangent on whether early BASICs were “compilers” or pure interpreters, with detailed back-and-forth on tokenization, parsing, and definitions of compilation.
  • Explanation that CP/M’s BIOS was a pluggable device-driver layer (not a ROM BIOS), enabling quick ports; admiration for how fast this could be implemented on 1970s hardware.
  • Mention of other DOS-like systems (FreeDOS, TurboDOS, MP/M) and how bundling and ecosystem effects made replacing MS‑DOS unattractive.

Media, Archives, and Nostalgia

  • Multiple pointers to “Computer Chronicles” episodes (especially the Kildall special) and Internet Archive collections, plus an EPUB conversion of the scanned memoir for better readability.
  • Nostalgic recollections of GEM, early Windows, and prepress/desktop-publishing workflows where multiple OSes briefly competed before Microsoft’s dominance solidified.