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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 Unfortunately Gary's passion for life also manifested in a struggle with alcoholism, and we feel that the unpublished preface and later chapters do not reflect his true self.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.
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(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday August 05 2016, @09:31AM
+1 to DR-DOS kicking ass and taking names.
Digital/Novell were looking to make it a real operating system vs. a small shell over hardware (which MS-DOS essentially is) by including protected memory management and preemptive task switching. It was essentially trying to do what OS/2 tried to do without breaking backwards compatibility. Microsoft strongarmed DR-DOS out of the market (the AARD code was targeted against it), and effectively killed it by shipping Windows 95.
Had Digital's GEM interface gotten more traction compared to Windows, there would be a decent chance DR-DOS would still be kicking today. GEM never reached feature parity with Windows 3.x, and although they were working on implementing multitasking and such, it never saw the light of day.
Still always moving