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posted by n1 on Friday August 05 2016, @03:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the troubled-genius dept.

The Computer History Museum has released part of the memoir of Gary Kildall. Kildall founded Digital Research, Inc., co-hosted The Computer Chronicles on television and wrote CP/M, the first operating system for personal computers. The extract from his memoir Computer Connections can be downloaded after agreeing to a lengthy EULA (Javascript required). It was provided by Kildall's family, who wrote

We have chosen to release only the first portion of his memoir. Unfortunately Gary's passion for life also manifested in a struggle with alcoholism, and we feel that the unpublished preface and later chapters do not reflect his true self.

In related news, a presentation comparing the source code of MS-DOS to that of CP/M will be given at the museum, in Mountain View, California, on Saturday during the Vintage Computer Festival.

additional coverage:


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday August 05 2016, @09:24AM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday August 05 2016, @09:24AM (#384433) Homepage Journal

    MS-DOS was based on a product Microsoft bought called QDOS which was intended to be a quick and dirty knock off CP/M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products [wikipedia.org] for the full story. Even taking an account that was 1980 dollar prices, MSFT made off like a fiend ...

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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Friday August 05 2016, @10:29AM

    by anubi (2828) on Friday August 05 2016, @10:29AM (#384437) Journal

    Thanks for the link, NCommander!

    That old CP/M I had on my old IMSAI was so similar to the MS-DOS I later played around with that I thought it was the same thing, just a later and more specific version.

    Of course, at that time, a lot of us were writing our own DOS. All incompatible with each other. My first one was centered around my pride and joy... a solenoid-controlled Astrocom-Marlux reel-to-reel audio tape transport sold by Lafayette Electronics. I made an interface to the IMSAI so it could control the transport. I would have to remember what starting block my program started at, and when I booted into my OS, it would ask me which block of the tape to start loading at. I would type in something like 38G2000(enter), and it would search the tape deck to find block 38 and start loading until end of file, then jump to location 2000. The onus was on me to know where the free blocks in the tape were and not overwrite any.
     
    ( I had my assembler on block 138 IIRC ).

    I remember I would format a 7" reel of tape and get several thousand blocks of 2 kilobytes each ( same data payload size as 2716 EPROM ). Manchester coded. I had coded that old OS to make it specifically easy for me to put stuff from RAM page to tape, tape to RAM, and RAM to EPROM, and EPROM to RAM.

    Remember those old erasers we had to put the 2716 under to clear them?

    Those were the days, weren't they?
     

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Friday August 05 2016, @10:52AM

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday August 05 2016, @10:52AM (#384441) Homepage Journal

      I postdate the era of "roll your own" OS by a good 10 years, but I'm well familiar with the concept, and I've done it on microcontrollers. For final shits and giggles though, if you want to play with a "modern" DOS-like environment, playing around with UEFI is basically portable DOS as the programming model is identical. It's not too hard to get any modern PC to load the UEFI shell (I've done it on this laptop, and on a 2011 desktop. My Itanium clunker had the shell burnt into ROM which helped a lot).

      In UEFI, your main function gets two points to a list of lists, and a list of pointers. Anyone who's familar with DOS will remember the magic list-of-lists programming model. You have to walk the table to figure out which APIs are available, and then call them with the correct prototype (the UEFI SDK has a rather impressive set of C macros to allow the compiler to catch most of the stupid. You can't just use a regular prototype as UEFI C uses an unusual call ABI which means most compilers can't do a regular function call into the function tables).

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @01:25PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 05 2016, @01:25PM (#384471)

        > You can't just use a regular prototype as UEFI C uses an unusual call ABI

        Is there any reason it’s different?

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday August 05 2016, @04:36PM

      by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 05 2016, @04:36PM (#384523) Journal

      Nice to meet someone else who had worked on an IMSAI 8080!

      I was working at a lab which made various diagnostic tests. Accounting software, among other things, was running on CP/M [www.gaby.de] on their IMSAI 8080 [wikipedia.org]. I remember the first time I read through the documentation thinking that it looked familiar... I had previous experience using a DEC PDP-8 [wikipedia.org] and then a PDP-11 [wikipedia.org] — remember PIP (peripheral interchange program)? The IMSAI had 8-inch floppy disks with a write-enable tab, IIRC. And then it appeared in the movie "War Games"... fun times, indeed.

      Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

      --
      Wit is intellect, dancing.
      • (Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday August 06 2016, @06:54AM

        by anubi (2828) on Saturday August 06 2016, @06:54AM (#384711) Journal

        The last thing I had bought for my IMSAI was a pair of CALCOMP100 8 inch drives, and an FD1771 controller. That was when I was finally giving into commercial software ( aka CP/M ). No sooner than I finally had that beast functional, the company I worked for at the time got one of the first IBM PC's.

        Back then, they actually put the source code of the software, AND the schematic diagram of the machine in the technical manual!

        I felt like I knew everything about my machine. If it broke, I could always go get my oscilloscope and find the hung line or chip that did not do what it was supposed to do.

        These new machines.... well I feel I am in a tiny neighborhood I know reasonably well in a huge city. Move me a couple of miles over and I am lost.

        --
        "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]