I vividly remember the DOS wars when I was using an early IBM compatible. I also remember DR-DOS being noticeably better than MS-DOS (accessing high memory etc) but I had no idea about all these tangles behind the scenes, or that DR-DOS was essentially a clone of the OS that had previously cloned CP/M.

It also seems that Gary Kildall embraced many of the principles that are enshrined in open source today, long before open source was coined as a term.

What was particularly tragic for me, in this story, was that essentially IBM had not agreed to Digital Research’s request for royalties instead of an outright license purchase, and yet ultimately the deal with Microsoft was based on royalties. In other words, the original deal could have been done with DR.

And yes, Microsoft was originally just a language company without any operating system. They actually bought their first operating system (said to be a clone/copy of Gary Kildall’s OS) for a steal.

In the business world, though, it comes down to who is the most ruthless and who has the money. The innovators basically get bought out. Yet as far as brilliant products go, we are totally still dependent upon those innovators to innovate.

I’m glad Hackaday featured this article about Gary Kildall, as it is a pity we did not know all this then, but the world was a very different place in the 1980s. All three parts of the video are well worth watching to understand how all the parts unfolded, and Part 3 gives insight into where DR-DOS came into the picture, what Gary did after that, and how he tragically died so young in the 1990s.

Given today’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and the DOS wars etc raging in the early 1990s, I really had to hold myself in to stop thinking his death was something sinister, given his pending book publication, and the later fact that his kids did not want to publish the latter part of his book.