Digital Research

~ the goodbye ~

Gary Kildall taught at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and wrote CP/M in the early 1970s because he wanted a way to get files off a floppy disk without rewriting the code every time the hardware changed. The trick in it was a small layer that sat between the operating system and the machine, so a program compiled once could run on any of the dozens of incompatible micros that manufacturers were shipping. He and Dorothy McEwen incorporated the business in 1974 under the name Intergalactic Digital Research, which was later shortened by people who had to say it out loud.

CP/M won the 8-bit era outright. If you bought a microcomputer between 1977 and 1982 that was not an Apple or a Commodore, it very likely booted into a CP/M prompt, and the entire first generation of serious microcomputer software was written against it. WordStar ran on CP/M. dBASE ran on CP/M. The company was making forty-five million dollars a year by 1983 and sat fourth in the industry.

Then there is the 1980 meeting, which has been told so many times it has stopped being history and become a fable. IBM came to Pacific Grove wanting an operating system for the machine that became the PC. What happened next depends on which account you read: Kildall was flying a plane that day, Dorothy balked at IBM's non-disclosure agreement, the negotiation stalled and IBM left. IBM went to Microsoft, Microsoft bought a CP/M-like system from a company in Seattle for a flat fee and licensed it onward, and the entire shape of the next forty years fell out of a bad afternoon.

This all finished before I could type. The company was signed over to Novell in October 1991, when I was seven, and the first operating system I ever sat in front of was the one that beat it. That is the honest position here. I did not use CP/M, I used its inheritor without knowing there had been a competitor at all, which is what winning a standards fight actually buys you.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it built after losing ~

The interesting part of Digital Research is the eleven years after the IBM meeting, because the company did not retreat. CP/M-86 shipped for the PC in 1981 and IBM sold it alongside PC DOS at roughly six times the price, which settled that. MP/M added multitasking in 1979, years before anyone expected it on a desk. GEM arrived in 1985 as a graphical shell that put windows and icons on ordinary DOS machines, and it shipped as standard on the Atari ST and on Amstrad's PCs in Europe.

DR DOS in 1988 was the sharpest of them. It did things MS-DOS could not yet do, it loaded drivers into upper memory while MS-DOS was still filling the first 640K, and it was cheap. Microsoft's answer was MS-DOS 5.0, which is the version most people remember fondly, and which exists in that form largely because DR DOS forced it.

~ the long tail ~

Novell paid about eighty million dollars in stock and the deal was ratified by Digital Research shareholders on 30 October 1991. Novell wanted the operating system line rather than the company, and the company stopped existing as a thing you could work for. Kildall died in July 1994 at fifty-two, after a head injury in a Monterey bar that no autopsy ever fully explained, and most of the obituaries led with the plane story rather than with the BIOS layer.

DR DOS kept moving. Novell sold it to Caldera in 1996, and Caldera used it as the evidence in an antitrust suit against Microsoft over exactly the tactics that had buried it, including a chunk of code in a Windows 3.1 beta that printed a scary and meaningless error when it detected a non-Microsoft DOS. Microsoft settled in January 2000 rather than let it reach a jury. Caldera later renamed itself and became something considerably worse, but that grave is next door.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »