A few corrections regarding the history I have witnessed, and some
comments on where we are today... (History? It isn't history yet if you
remember it, is it???)
> You got most of the facts right Suzanne. Of course Gates would
> probably still be working on his degree in poker, it Paul Allen hadn't called
> him up and talked him into moving to New Mexico. They wrote a basic
> interpreter for the Altair 8800 (anyone remember??).
Yes, I remember. I think it was maybe $300 or $500 or some
astronomical sum of money, and I did not see why I needed it. I was
programming in assembly language on an IMSAI 8080 at the time, writing,
and later selling, an editor. Some years later, I had a script-like text
processing system on the market. I think by then I was up to 16K of static
RAM in 1977. My own machine! It was glorious!
I ran that machine till the winter of 1984, I think. It was up to
56K or so, with some space reserved for ROM and disk drive buffers, and
the processor was a Z-80 by then. It was still glorious! But much slower
than my Osborne Executive, Televideo something or other, or Televideo
TPC-1, which was still Z80 based. Soon, the Televideo TPC-2 was out, 8088
based, but by then I had a genuine IBM PC. And nearly nothing that ran on
it except some silly game where you shot at happy faces tumbling out of
boxes in a maze.
> They guy's name was Gary Kincaid (last name not sure) and he was the
> one who wrote CP/M. And he just wouldn't play the IBM rules of the
Gary Kildahl!!! (or Kildhall?) I actually met him in person once.
He was a university professor, a consultant, and co-host of some computer
show, Computer Currents? He was a true founder of the personal computer
revolution, along with the guys who made the first MITS Altair. I
understand the Altair was built it in the bathroom of a mobile home, which
was also a kind of photo darkroom and lab. They expected to sell 12 of
them the first year... Only a few of us remember that MITS, Micro
Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, also made digital voltmeter kits. I
almost bought one of those voltmeters a year or two earlier.
> time...He came down to see them, but he was getting ready to go surfing
> and didn't have time for them (they didn't have an appointment). Bill
> Gates groveled and yes purchased DOS from Seattle Computer for
> $50,000.
He was out flying that morning, delivering some equipment, but was
present for the afternoon meeting. The first offer IBM made to Billy
Gates, Gates rejected, and suggested that IBM go see Gary. Gary rejected
that offer for the same reasons -- not enough money, and no right to say
that they had done it. That is what he said in the interview in Byte or
Kilobaud magazine some months after the IBM-Gates deal became public. He
also talked about it in a lecture that I came in late on, I think it may
have been at the Trenton, New Jersy computer swap meet.
Billy took the second offer, the one that let him say he wrote it,
because shrewd guy that he was, he saw he was being paid(!) for what
amounted to advertising(!) his productS to the world. The offer itself,
some $70,000 for an operating system and a bunch of language products, was
ridiculously low! Billy wrote those language products. A friend of mine
remembers talking with him about the bugs, back when Billy answered the
phone himself. Billy, no matter how we may dislike what he did later,
knew his stuff and did a LOT of programming! And he DID help build our
future.
But the curious thing is... I heard from an IBMer Bill Gates mother
or aunt was on IBM's board of directors at the time...
> He also stole the concept for windows from Apple...but then Apple stole it
> from Xerox, so in this day and age I guess 2 wrongs make a right.
This is correct, he did steal it, and the lady who demonstrated it to
him first refused to do so, till she had written orders from her superiors
to do so. And Apple had the stupidity to contract MS to create it for
them! Of course Billy walked off with much of it! His team learned how
(not) to do it on Apple, and screwed them both with a bad operating
system, and by stealing the main concepts of it!
> > >> What I don't understand is if so many people are against what Microsoft
> > >> is doing, then why don't the computer manufacturers choose another
> > >> operating system to ship with their systems? Microsoft doesn't own the
> > >> computers. They own the software.
> > (which Windows runs on top of)? Isn't that, and the fact that Apple
> > Computer thought it could get away with charging more for a superior
> > computer, the main reason PCs with Microsoft's operating system became the
> > industry standard?
No, it was only because IBM put their stamp of approval on the thing.
That is what sold the PC's. Then Lotus came in and REALLY gave
corporations a reason to buy the PC!
You had to buy DOS separately. As the clones started "happening",
mostly ill contrived incompatible clones that would not run Lotus 123 or
Lotus Symphony.
Gates then had the idea of giving a tremendous discount _IF_ YOU
published the manuals, and didn't bother him about anything anymore. Just
send some $20 or $30 per PC you shipped, regardless of what operating
systems you had on it. Later, the contracts said you could ONLY ship
their operating system. I know, because I almost worked on adapting
Concurrent CPM to the new DEC dial processor PC. They had both a Z-80 and
an 8088 processor. And a dual disk drive that you could not swap the top
and bottom diskettes on. (The heads were on the outside sides of a common
spindle, so single writable side of the diskette seemed to spin in
opposite directions with respect to the head. The software engineers
called it the most stupid thing DEC ever designed.)
> > BTW, the "Revenge of the Nerds' video which I've seen a couple of times on
> > public tv, is an absolutely fascinating portrayal of the early years of
> > PCs and Macs. The saddest part of the story was learning that another
> > developer was approached by IBM and his wife, who handled the meeting in
> > his absence, refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The IBM dudes
That is not what Gary Kildahl or any of the other participants said
in interviews on Computer Currents or in text. Gary was there, HE refused
to sign. AND... in a later interview, predicted that over five million
would be sold the first year (or was it two?) Others said he was WAY over
optimistic, but was far closer to the mark than most industry experts at
the time. He said he knew what he was doing, and that is just the way it
was. As I recall it, he said that he had no real regrets, it was just the
way the deal came out. The deal was not right.
I agree with Gary, that if he did not get the right to say that it
was HIS operating system, the contract was worth very little. I think it
was something like $25,000, or $30,000 that they offered him on that first
round. IBM's usual contracting practices were that if you disclosed to the
customer that you were providing the product IBM was selling, the contract
would be canceled and there might be substantial penalties involved. If
so, Gary, and Billy, both made the right decision with respect to the
first deal. Gary was not offered the second deal...
I later bought Concurrent CPM. It was fantastic! It was closer to
where Linux is today, than DOS or Windows 3.1. It had true multi-tasking,
multiple console windows (though only 4, ) and was impressive at how it
interleaved disk bound tasks with heavy computer bound tasks top provide
really significant throughput improvements -- a good mix of programs, such
as an edit session, a compile, and a test, ran in 35 percent of the time
that it would take to do them one at a time. It wasn't till Windows 95
came out, that you had anywhere NEAR real multi-tasking on a DOS platform.
(There was Double Dos, and PC-MOS, but they were add-ons written by OTHER
people.) But... it would not work with many clone diskette drives... IBM
had seen to that in some timing thing when one swapped from one drive to
another.
> > walked, went back to Gates, who seized the opportunity, spent $50,000 to
> > buy DOS from someone else and sold it to IBM. The first guy committed
> > suicide years later. If my memory of the story is correct, DOS was a
> > back-engineered version of the dead guy's operation system (somebody
> > correct me if I'm wrong on the details).
I did not hear about any suicide. The product was QDOS, originally
sold by Lomas Data Systems with their 8086 based S-100 machines.
That guy successfully sued Billy Gates for a number of millions of
dollars. The rumor is that he had "lease" in the contract, and Billy just
wrote "sale" over it. But who can tell, neither would discuss it from
what I heard.
I bought my first electronic computer in 1975, a KIM-1. I bought an
IMSAI 8080 in 1976. Later, I tried to convince a friend that we should
write CPS, Conversational Programming System for the 8080. It was in the
public domain, available for the IBM 360's, and we had the source. It was
vastly superior to Basic. He regrets not saying yes to this day!
In 1985, I was selling a browser with textual icons ("Tcons", we
called them,) for browsing the files and executing the programs of your
PC. Due to a bad choice of people, and a deadly fungal infection, we died
in the market. We did get a contract from NASA, though. Our sales
efforts were disastrous! Computer stores were livid that we would steal
their training revenues by making the computer too easy to use. I was
almost physically thrown out of some computer stores by screaming owners
when they saw how easy it made computers to use! (This was really hard
for me to believe what I was hearing!) Two years later, most of them
folded when their training revenues dried up. We did sell some via mail
order, and had some ecstatic customers, but with mounting medical bills and
not enough energy to DO anything, things deteriorated. When I was flown
to California for treatment, my parents refused to let me take my PC so
that I would not work to death... It was over half a year before I managed
to borrow a PC, and nearly a year before I got my hand on the source AND
managed to borrow a PC that I could put the 25 megs of code onto. I was
dead broke and barely alive; but I was alive!!!
If, in the depths of my illness, I had not had that product to work
on, had not realized that something like my product would link computers
together, I would probably have given up and died. I was wracked by
seizures, emaciated to the point of looking like a concentration camp
victim, and barely able to stagger across our home without sitting down to
rest, all because of a fungus growing in my guts. The only thing that
kept me alive was the vision of a browser like product. It was different.
Andreeson did a better job, and I congratulated him on it when I met him
this year. No regrets.
The really nice thing is that we have the browser and the world wide
web today. Maybe indirectly my browser inspired some of the ideas that
built it, maybe it didn't. That is not important. The important thing is
that we DO have it! And I am thrilled to live in this age, where I can
reach into the patent office to look at patents as I had dreamed of doing
in 1962, in my Jr. High School days, and peer through telescopes to see
the rings of Saturn as if from up close! What the web has brought us...
makes my eyes moist just remembering some of the NASA pages and others I
have seen. This is a heaven we are all building, every last one of us.
And I am honored just to be able to live to see all this.
Not all the glory goes to those who try. But knowing that we were a
part of the race, has glory too. I have touched the sky... I may "limp" a
little today from my adventure, but I survived!!! And that is a lot more
than many others can say!
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