> was more interested that day in going flying his plane than meeting with corporate men in navy suits. (This may be apocryphal.) That day was his wife’s birth

> was more interested that day in going flying his plane than meeting with corporate men in navy suits. (This may be apocryphal.) That day was his wife’s birthday and he had already promised her to go flying. Here it is reported by Stewart Cheifet, his long term co-host of the Computer Chronicles (which is a treasure and freely available in the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles): > “... but it’s just as good. It’s just that that day they came was his wife’s birthday, and he said «Sorry, I’m committed to my wife, we’re gonna go flying» [...] He didn’t have to worry about money, but what killed Gary was just the... he was annoyed at what happened. [...] [Cheifet in an excerpt from Computer Chronicles in 1983:] Gary, are we at the end of the line in the evolution of computer hardware?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdtHS_X1ibg&t=430s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdtHS_X1ibg&t=430s Edit to add: the first video in the Computer Chronicles Archive collection is the “Gary Kildall Special” from 1995, and I quote here a couple of paragraphs: > “In 1976, Gary and his wife Dorothy founded a company called «Intergalactic Digital Research», later shortened to «Digital Research».” > “The main thing that CP/M brought that was different from how anybody else was approaching micro-computers, was that Gary made a logical separation of the physical I/O system from what was called the BDOS. The physical layer system was called the BIOS, the Basic I/O System, and that was the term that Gary used in early CP/M. The BDOS was the Basic Disk Operating System. The BDOS was independent of the specific hardware that you had in your micro-computer. By comparison, we are looking at the time of UNIX being out as a major mini-computer operating system, and you could not move executables of any application program from one UNIX machine, unless it was an identical machine, to another system. So that was really a remarkable innovation.” > “CP/M sold extremely well, and DRI flourished. The company expanded to larger quarters across the street, the number of employees grew from 9 to 24. When the new VAX mini-computer arrived, it was too large to fit inside the building, so the entire structure was lifted off its foundation to accommodate the machine. A beaming Gary told the staff that they would all be getting a «raise» that week.”