14 ms·

Yes it's apocryphal. Please stop repeating it. It's disrespectful to the late great Dr Gary Kildall, for a start, and to his cofounder and business partner, the

Yes it's apocryphal. Please stop repeating it. It's disrespectful to the late great Dr Gary Kildall, for a start, and to his cofounder and business partner, the late Dorothy McEwen. From memory and without consulting much in the way of references: * Dr Kildall's personal and business partner Dorothy was the company's cofounder and dealt with contracts etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_McEwen_Kildall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_McEwen_Kildall * Dr Kildall, as the CEO of the most significant microcomputer OS vendor in the world at that time, had his own plane, yes, and he piloted it himself. He was going on a site visit to a major customer. It wasn't for fun; it was a business trip, and it wasn't his job to deal with IBM. * DR had good reasons to refuse the deal. 1. IBM wanted DR to sign a very restrictive NDA; DR had a policy against that. Ms Kidlall refused. MS, as a small company with nothing much to lose, happily signed. 2. IBM offered $250K for an unlimited license. DR quite rightly refused and so did MS. MS retained the rights to licence DOS to other vendors, and it did, a lot, and made a lot of money thereby. The deal IBM offered DR precluded that. * AIUI, MS licensed SCP QDOS for $50K. It only bought it in later on, for a lot more money. It ended up paying $1M for it, and that was still a bargain. This is not ancient history. It was only about 40 years ago. Many of the protagonists are still alive and active, notably Tim Paterson and a certain William H Gates the 3rd.

hindsightbias 4y ago
So DR had a dumb policy and were not great negotiators. Gates knew exactly what had fallen into his lap.
- lproven 4y ago
  No, not really. At the time, IBM made very expensive mainframes and minicomputers, plus all the associated paraphernalia: terminals, printers, storage. It didn't make microcomputers. It didn't really sell to the general public. It sold smaller kit to big businesses, and the bigger kit even they couldn't buy: you could only lease it. Microcomputers were only just beginning to be a product sold to the public for home use. Up until the first few complete, integrated systems in around 1976-1977 (in the USA, the Apple ][, Commodore PET, and original TRS-80), microcomputers had been expensive modular devices, used in business. That's the market DR sold to, and utterly dominated: relatively price S100-bus small business micros. DR was not _a_ big player in microcomputer OSes, it was _the_ big player. Almost the only player: I can't think of any other cross-platform microcomputer OS available in the 1970s. The PC was a highly atypical product for IBM, made from COTS parts, intended to be sold to the public, direct to end-users. It's not really something anyone expected IBM to do, and in this position, it was a company nervously trying to get into a totally new market for them, approaching the industry giant with caps in hands.
jecel 4y ago
The IBM guys had gone to Seattle expecting to license CP/M. Their "benchmark" (in business terms) was the Apple II with Microsoft's Z80 SoftCard running CP/M. As far as they could tell, Microsoft owned CP/M. Bill Gates told them otherwise, phoned Gary Kildall but had to be vague and then sent the IBM guys on a plane to California. I can only guess they were pretty upset even before they ever got to DRI. People's memories of what happened vary. One of the IBM guys claimed no meeting happened and they went back to Seattle even more upset (which is the most popular version). Gary claims that after some back and forth between Dorothy and her lawyer she did sign the NDA and that he arrived towards the end of the meeting and had a nice chat about the technical side with the IBM people. The PC was launched with a choice of three operating systems: PC-DOS (the licensed MS-DOS), CP/M86 and UCSD Pascal. But the first cost less than a third of the other two.
- electroly 4y ago
  > As far as they could tell, Microsoft owned CP/M CP/M prints a Digital Research copyright when you boot it up; this seems hard to believe. Is there corroboration?
  - laumars 4y ago
    This is one part of the story that most people agree on. I think I’ve even seen an interview with Bill Gates where he recalls this.
  - flomo 4y ago
    The Apple II softcard version does show a Microsoft copyright. (This was reportedly the most popular platform for CP/M.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCV81rlwMTU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCV81rlwMTU
- WalterBright 4y ago
  As I recall, PC-DOS sold for $40. CP/M86 sold for $180. People overwhelmingly bought PC-DOS because it was cheaper and nobody was able to explain why CP/M86 was worth the much higher price. The company I worked for bought both, and I tried CP/M86. There was no reason to prefer it over PC-DOS, and that was that.
II2II 4y ago
We will never know what happened on that day. None of the witnesses can be considered reliable. Even if they consider their own accounts as honest, the eventual fallout would taint their memories of the events. The best we can hope for is documentation to support one hypothesis or another (e.g. contracts). That said, I do agree the common account is both disrespectful and inaccurate. I never understood why people would believe that Gary Kildall or Dorthy McEwen would brush off a business meeting. They may not have been an empire builders, but they were successful business people who built a successful business.
- marktangotango 4y ago
  > None of the witnesses can be considered reliable. I find this to be a curious statement, as in not reliable in what way? Gordon Eubanks company was acquired by Kildall and worked for them at the time. I found this interview to very interesting, he touches on those events and gives his perspective. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102717361 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10271736...
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Accounts differ and parties have their professional reputations on the line; want to pin the failure on the other. See jecel below.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  We absolutely know the source for the “Gary went flying” story: Bill Gates. But he wasn’t actually there!
- rileyphone 4y ago
  See also https://dfarq.homeip.net/how-dos-came-to-be-ibms-choice-of-operating-system-2/ https://dfarq.homeip.net/how-dos-came-to-be-ibms-choice-of-o...
- leoc 4y ago
  One thing that does seem almost certain is that, to whatever extent Kildall did intentionally skip or turn up late to the meeting, it was more likely an attempted power move or an expression of annoyance than the sort of genuine indifference or carelessness that the "Gary went flying" story usually tries to suggest. But naturally the IBM representatives would not have been happy to be deliberately flexed on by an SME owner, either.
kmeisthax 4y ago
There's a third reason why the DR/IBM deal didn't work out: CP-M/86 was extremely delayed. The reason why SCP QDOS even existed was that SCP had an S-100 machine with an 8086 in it and there was no OS that could run it. Microsoft wasn't necessarily a "small company with nothing to lose", either. They had the best BASIC interpreter in the business[0] and everyone licensed from them already. [0] This also allowed them to strong-arm Apple into making a few licensing deals that would kill all the "look and feel" shenanigans later into that decade.
- marktangotango 4y ago
  > They had the best BASIC interpreter in the business[0] and everyone licensed from them already. Commodore 64 owners may have a different opinion.... :P
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    So would some Apple II owners. I don’t think MS BASIC was the best in the business, but it was the most ubiquitous. If only Woz had been willing to add floating point support to his BASIC. He was perfectly capable of it! Would’ve saved Apple a lot of heartache later.
    - rowanG077 4y ago
      Why was Woz unwilling to add floating point support?
      - laumars 4y ago
        He wasn’t unwilling. The story I heard was that it’s the usual tail of time constraints. It was quicker to license Microsoft BASIC than it was to add floating points to Integer BASIC.
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    c64 Basic was licensed from Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC
kabdib 4y ago
I did some work at DRI in 1984 (my group was housed in the old KMST television studio, on the outskirts of the DRI campus, for about four months while we ported GEM to the Atari ST). My manager talked with Gary about the CP/M incident at one point. Apparently some "guys in suits" showed up without an appointment one day, wouldn't say who they were, wouldn't sign an NDA, and were demanding to see Gary. They were sent away without talking to anyone. Gary was in his office the whole time, and definitely not flying. Take it as you like. My Kildall Number is 2.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  Strange that everyone else says more or less exactly the opposite?
  - sedatk 4y ago
    Popularity doesn’t make facts. People tend to align with popular thought anyway, so, it may as well be a feedback loop.
    - zabzonk 4y ago
      Occam's Razor suggests that what has been published as truth for a long, long time (since the actual events, in fact) is truth, rather than being made up by gullible people.
      - laumars 4y ago
        There has been several published accounts from different people involved, all of which differ. The story the GP published is one such version (I’ve read that account elsewhere, published as first hand). AFAIK there isn’t even a popular opinion since most people tend to agree we will never know the truth. And of those who do have an opinion, those opinions have been largely split (as evidenced by the comments on here). So I have no idea why you’re so confident in your assertion but it is entirely misplaced.
        4y ago
anonymousiam 4y ago
You left out the part about SCP blatantly ripping off the CP/M OS to produce QDOS, which Bill Gates purchased in order to license to IBM. The CP/M source code was widely available, but still copyrighted by DRC. At the time, I recall having a CP/M-based x86 cross-assembler that did a pretty good job. It probably took Tim Paterson a day or two to hack QDOS together given the availability of the CP/M source code and tools. If QDOS was an original work, why use "5" as the system call interrupt? (CP/M used "call 5".) The QDOS system call function list and arguments are identical to CP/M. The FCB-based disk layout was also virtually the same as CP/M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products https://www.theregister.com/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit_resolved/ https://www.theregister.com/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit_...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rowanG077 4y ago
  Why would you intentially make things different? There is a lot of value on agreeing on low level details.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Haven't the courts decided that an interface is not copyrightable? Also, CP/M bore a remarkable resemblance to DEC operating systems, like RT-11.
  - spc476 4y ago
    The 8086 was not object compatible with the 8080, but one could "assemble" 8080 code (or even Z80 code) into 8086 with an automated process. It might not be optimal code, but it would get a working application up and running rather quick on new hardware.
- EvanAnderson 4y ago
  The analysis done by Robert Zeidman in 2014[1] published in the Journal of Software Engineering and Applications comes to the conclusion that no code was copied from CP/M by SCP. Tim Paterson has stated that API and structure compatibility were explicit goals. That can be achieved w/o copying any code. re: "5" as the system call interrupt - I've never seen an SCP machine or QDOS, but on an IBM PC interrupt 5 handled print screen (and on the 80186 and up it was a CPU-generated interrupt for BOUND exceptions). [1] https://www.scirp.org/html/4-9301871_46362.htm https://www.scirp.org/html/4-9301871_46362.htm
phendrenad2 4y ago
When I heard the (fake) story, it went like this: IBM offered to buy DOS first, but Gates & Allen rejected it. Gates, being an acquaintance of Gary Kildall, told them to give Digital Research a try. He phoned Gary and said, playfully "They're coming for you next". Gary took this to mean someone was coming for him, and jumped in his plane and left. When IBM showed up, he was mysteriously missing, and everyone involved was confused. Usually truth is stranger than fiction, but in this case I think the fiction above is hilarious and top-notch alternate history.

hindsightbias 4y ago

So DR had a dumb policy and were not great negotiators. Gates knew exactly what had fallen into his lap.

lproven 4y ago
No, not really. At the time, IBM made very expensive mainframes and minicomputers, plus all the associated paraphernalia: terminals, printers, storage. It didn't make microcomputers. It didn't really sell to the general public. It sold smaller kit to big businesses, and the bigger kit even they couldn't buy: you could only lease it. Microcomputers were only just beginning to be a product sold to the public for home use. Up until the first few complete, integrated systems in around 1976-1977 (in the USA, the Apple ][, Commodore PET, and original TRS-80), microcomputers had been expensive modular devices, used in business. That's the market DR sold to, and utterly dominated: relatively price S100-bus small business micros. DR was not _a_ big player in microcomputer OSes, it was _the_ big player. Almost the only player: I can't think of any other cross-platform microcomputer OS available in the 1970s. The PC was a highly atypical product for IBM, made from COTS parts, intended to be sold to the public, direct to end-users. It's not really something anyone expected IBM to do, and in this position, it was a company nervously trying to get into a totally new market for them, approaching the industry giant with caps in hands.

jecel 4y ago

The IBM guys had gone to Seattle expecting to license CP/M. Their "benchmark" (in business terms) was the Apple II with Microsoft's Z80 SoftCard running CP/M. As far as they could tell, Microsoft owned CP/M. Bill Gates told them otherwise, phoned Gary Kildall but had to be vague and then sent the IBM guys on a plane to California. I can only guess they were pretty upset even before they ever got to DRI. People's memories of what happened vary. One of the IBM guys claimed no meeting happened and they went back to Seattle even more upset (which is the most popular version). Gary claims that after some back and forth between Dorothy and her lawyer she did sign the NDA and that he arrived towards the end of the meeting and had a nice chat about the technical side with the IBM people. The PC was launched with a choice of three operating systems: PC-DOS (the licensed MS-DOS), CP/M86 and UCSD Pascal. But the first cost less than a third of the other two.

electroly 4y ago
> As far as they could tell, Microsoft owned CP/M CP/M prints a Digital Research copyright when you boot it up; this seems hard to believe. Is there corroboration?
- laumars 4y ago
  This is one part of the story that most people agree on. I think I’ve even seen an interview with Bill Gates where he recalls this.
- flomo 4y ago
  The Apple II softcard version does show a Microsoft copyright. (This was reportedly the most popular platform for CP/M.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCV81rlwMTU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCV81rlwMTU
WalterBright 4y ago
As I recall, PC-DOS sold for $40. CP/M86 sold for $180. People overwhelmingly bought PC-DOS because it was cheaper and nobody was able to explain why CP/M86 was worth the much higher price. The company I worked for bought both, and I tried CP/M86. There was no reason to prefer it over PC-DOS, and that was that.

II2II 4y ago

We will never know what happened on that day. None of the witnesses can be considered reliable. Even if they consider their own accounts as honest, the eventual fallout would taint their memories of the events. The best we can hope for is documentation to support one hypothesis or another (e.g. contracts). That said, I do agree the common account is both disrespectful and inaccurate. I never understood why people would believe that Gary Kildall or Dorthy McEwen would brush off a business meeting. They may not have been an empire builders, but they were successful business people who built a successful business.

marktangotango 4y ago
> None of the witnesses can be considered reliable. I find this to be a curious statement, as in not reliable in what way? Gordon Eubanks company was acquired by Kildall and worked for them at the time. I found this interview to very interesting, he touches on those events and gives his perspective. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102717361 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10271736...
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Accounts differ and parties have their professional reputations on the line; want to pin the failure on the other. See jecel below.
KerrAvon 4y ago
We absolutely know the source for the “Gary went flying” story: Bill Gates. But he wasn’t actually there!
rileyphone 4y ago
See also https://dfarq.homeip.net/how-dos-came-to-be-ibms-choice-of-operating-system-2/ https://dfarq.homeip.net/how-dos-came-to-be-ibms-choice-of-o...
leoc 4y ago
One thing that does seem almost certain is that, to whatever extent Kildall did intentionally skip or turn up late to the meeting, it was more likely an attempted power move or an expression of annoyance than the sort of genuine indifference or carelessness that the "Gary went flying" story usually tries to suggest. But naturally the IBM representatives would not have been happy to be deliberately flexed on by an SME owner, either.

kmeisthax 4y ago

There's a third reason why the DR/IBM deal didn't work out: CP-M/86 was extremely delayed. The reason why SCP QDOS even existed was that SCP had an S-100 machine with an 8086 in it and there was no OS that could run it. Microsoft wasn't necessarily a "small company with nothing to lose", either. They had the best BASIC interpreter in the business[0] and everyone licensed from them already. [0] This also allowed them to strong-arm Apple into making a few licensing deals that would kill all the "look and feel" shenanigans later into that decade.

marktangotango 4y ago
> They had the best BASIC interpreter in the business[0] and everyone licensed from them already. Commodore 64 owners may have a different opinion.... :P
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  So would some Apple II owners. I don’t think MS BASIC was the best in the business, but it was the most ubiquitous. If only Woz had been willing to add floating point support to his BASIC. He was perfectly capable of it! Would’ve saved Apple a lot of heartache later.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    Why was Woz unwilling to add floating point support?
    - laumars 4y ago
      He wasn’t unwilling. The story I heard was that it’s the usual tail of time constraints. It was quicker to license Microsoft BASIC than it was to add floating points to Integer BASIC.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  c64 Basic was licensed from Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC

kabdib 4y ago

I did some work at DRI in 1984 (my group was housed in the old KMST television studio, on the outskirts of the DRI campus, for about four months while we ported GEM to the Atari ST). My manager talked with Gary about the CP/M incident at one point. Apparently some "guys in suits" showed up without an appointment one day, wouldn't say who they were, wouldn't sign an NDA, and were demanding to see Gary. They were sent away without talking to anyone. Gary was in his office the whole time, and definitely not flying. Take it as you like. My Kildall Number is 2.

zabzonk 4y ago
Strange that everyone else says more or less exactly the opposite?
- sedatk 4y ago
  Popularity doesn’t make facts. People tend to align with popular thought anyway, so, it may as well be a feedback loop.
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    Occam's Razor suggests that what has been published as truth for a long, long time (since the actual events, in fact) is truth, rather than being made up by gullible people.
    - laumars 4y ago
      There has been several published accounts from different people involved, all of which differ. The story the GP published is one such version (I’ve read that account elsewhere, published as first hand). AFAIK there isn’t even a popular opinion since most people tend to agree we will never know the truth. And of those who do have an opinion, those opinions have been largely split (as evidenced by the comments on here). So I have no idea why you’re so confident in your assertion but it is entirely misplaced.
      - 4y ago

anonymousiam 4y ago

You left out the part about SCP blatantly ripping off the CP/M OS to produce QDOS, which Bill Gates purchased in order to license to IBM. The CP/M source code was widely available, but still copyrighted by DRC. At the time, I recall having a CP/M-based x86 cross-assembler that did a pretty good job. It probably took Tim Paterson a day or two to hack QDOS together given the availability of the CP/M source code and tools. If QDOS was an original work, why use "5" as the system call interrupt? (CP/M used "call 5".) The QDOS system call function list and arguments are identical to CP/M. The FCB-based disk layout was also virtually the same as CP/M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products https://www.theregister.com/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit_resolved/ https://www.theregister.com/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit_...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rowanG077 4y ago
Why would you intentially make things different? There is a lot of value on agreeing on low level details.
WalterBright 4y ago
Haven't the courts decided that an interface is not copyrightable? Also, CP/M bore a remarkable resemblance to DEC operating systems, like RT-11.
- spc476 4y ago
  The 8086 was not object compatible with the 8080, but one could "assemble" 8080 code (or even Z80 code) into 8086 with an automated process. It might not be optimal code, but it would get a working application up and running rather quick on new hardware.
EvanAnderson 4y ago
The analysis done by Robert Zeidman in 2014[1] published in the Journal of Software Engineering and Applications comes to the conclusion that no code was copied from CP/M by SCP. Tim Paterson has stated that API and structure compatibility were explicit goals. That can be achieved w/o copying any code. re: "5" as the system call interrupt - I've never seen an SCP machine or QDOS, but on an IBM PC interrupt 5 handled print screen (and on the 80186 and up it was a CPU-generated interrupt for BOUND exceptions). [1] https://www.scirp.org/html/4-9301871_46362.htm https://www.scirp.org/html/4-9301871_46362.htm

phendrenad2 4y ago

When I heard the (fake) story, it went like this: IBM offered to buy DOS first, but Gates & Allen rejected it. Gates, being an acquaintance of Gary Kildall, told them to give Digital Research a try. He phoned Gary and said, playfully "They're coming for you next". Gary took this to mean someone was coming for him, and jumped in his plane and left. When IBM showed up, he was mysteriously missing, and everyone involved was confused. Usually truth is stranger than fiction, but in this case I think the fiction above is hilarious and top-notch alternate history.