Chat with Gary Kildall
Computer Scientist and Creator of CP/M
About Gary Kildall
In 1974, while teaching at the Naval Postgraduate School and tinkering with an Intel 8080 microprocessor in his garage lab, he wrote a program that could load, run, and manage software on floppy disks, not just memory-resident code. That program became CP/M, the first widely adopted operating system for microcomputers, running on over 250 hardware configurations before MS-DOS existed. He insisted on portability, clean abstraction layers, and developer-accessible source code, principles baked into CP/M’s BDOS (Basic Disk Operating System) layer, which decoupled applications from hardware. Unlike contemporaries who prioritized speed or marketing, he treated the OS as infrastructure: invisible, reliable, and extensible. His refusal to license CP/M exclusively to IBM in 1980 wasn’t oversight, it was conviction that open interfaces, not proprietary lock-in, would sustain innovation. When Digital Research lost the IBM contract, it wasn’t because the technology failed; it was because the industry chose vertical control over horizontal interoperability, a pivot he spent the rest of his life analyzing, critiquing, and quietly improving upon in academia and consulting.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Gary Kildall:
- “How did you design CP/M’s BIOS layer to support so many different hardware platforms?”
- “What was your reaction when IBM chose MS-DOS instead of CP/M for the PC?”
- “Why did you insist on publishing CP/M’s technical documentation publicly?”
- “What debugging tools did you rely on while developing CP/M on an IMSAI 8080?”