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Portion of Gary Kildall's Memoir Made Public

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

butthurt writes:

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 Unfortunately Gary's passion for life also manifested in a struggle with alcoholism, and we feel that the unpublished preface and later chapters do not reflect his true self.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:

• IEEE Spectrum
• The Register (alternate link)

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Original Submission

• Re:Microsoft victim #1 Re:Microsoft victim #1 (Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Friday August 05 2016, @10:52AM

  by NCommander (2) <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).

  --
  Still always moving

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
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• Re:Microsoft victim #1 (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?

  Parent