Posted on 07/10/2024 4:44:20 PM PDT by nickcarraway
my first pc was a dec Rainbow, came with CPM and DOS...
i was using RSX at work so...
“You could have been Bill Gates...”
And he was damn lucky to have NOT been Bill Gates. The only upside to being Bill Gates for him (as he was already loaded), would have been the ability to buy Facebook and other left wing media outlets and clean them up, as Musk did with Twitter.
...but it’s unlikely that would have been a priority with him.
I had a Dec Rainbow 100 on loan from work. I do recall it being dual boot. It warmed my dorm room.
I also later used DR-DOS on an 80386 I built from a jameco kit.
Was lucky to spend an hour or so talking with Gary on set-up day at one of the Philadelphia computer shows in the 70s. Very nice guy and clearly one of the early innovators.
Interesting story. The guy still did well in selling his company for 120M which was a lot of money back then .. still is. Too bad he died young.
DR-DOS was it, till it died...
My understanding of the story was that IBM because it was such a large company had a standard non-disclosure agreement that said we are a big company, we are not liable for anything you disclose. You have no recourse if we develop a similar product.
On advice of his general council for DRI Gary would not sign the non-non-disclosure agreement and IBM packed up and left.
If you were sent out to a business trip to Monterey CA would you be upset if you had to stay a couple of extra days on the Company dime?
Also Dr. Kildall was not some Harvard drop out, he was a professor at the Naval Post Graduate School. They would have made accomodations for him he he was delayed fro some reason.
Microsoft has turned its Windows platform into a “toy” operating system with Windows 11.
“”DR-DOS was it, till it died...””
Thank goodness...even if it did usher in the deplorable Gates.
Thanks for the thread - very interesting.
Wow, what a story. Maybe they should make this into a movie?
Bill Gates is a little punk asswipe compared to what this guy accomplished.
certain former dec employees still insist that gates stole code from dec when he interned there.
it’s not too hard to imagine...pirating seems to occur everywhere.
I had a TRS 80 that hardly did anything but it was still pretty fun to tinker with. Then I went to a Commodore-64 which was really fun compared to that. I’m running a 12 core monster gamer with mega ram and a really zippy graphics card these days. One of many game machines I’ve had. How times change huh?
Back in the day, I built many z80 machines that ran CPM. Most were based on the STD bus.
I was working on industrial control hardware and software. We used CPM machines as development environments for embedded z80 controllers.
Very handy stuff, before the original IBM PC and AT made the scene.
Before that, we used the Intel MDS (microprocessor development system). It included ICE (In-Circuit Emulation) of the 8086 and other processors. Floppy disk storage. Beat the hell out of paper tape.
Fun, exciting times!
right? we’d all laugh at those specs back then as unobtainum...
After the Commodore my first PC running DOS and Windows 3.1 was a Packard Bell, which remember ending up calling a Packare HELL. What a POS that gave me nothing but trouble.
We’ve come a ‘long way baby’, huh?
Kaypro forever
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