This document copyright Herbert R. Johnson 2008. Updated Jan 4 2009.This document is referenced from my discussion of early CP/M history via this Web link.
original document is the
Gordon Eubanks Oral History,
Computerworld Honors Program, INternational Archives.
Location: Cupertino, California
Date: November 8, 2000
Interviewer: Daniel S. Morrow (DSM)
Executive Director, Computerworld Honors
The interview is a biography of Eubanks from his childhood forward. This note is spedific to comments about Gary Kildall, whome he first met in 1975 at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Kildall became his grad advisor. "In 1975 I show up at Monterey at the old Hotel del Monte, and as life would have it, one of the top professors of computer science there was a guy named Gary Kildall." Eubanks wrote BASIC-E as his master's thesis, completed in 1976. Then he wrote CBASIC for IMSAI in 18 months as a commercial product, starting Compiler Systems Inc.
Quoting Eubanks: "When I first met Gary at the postgraduate school and he was my thesis adviser, he was mulling over what to do with CPM. Just to be clear, CPM was something that he wrote to demonstrate that these microcomputers could be general purpose computers. He wrote it to just show the value of the technology. Al Shugart at Seagate donated a couple of disk drives. Somebody wrote a disk drive controller card that was wire round. There were like three of them in existence. He had an Intel blue box, which just had the CPU in it. He had jerry-rigged this system to run CPM on it. There were like two or three of these systems in existence in the world. There was really weren't even prints to show how this disk controller worked. I don't know if it could ever have been reproduced. Who knows what would have happened if the thing had failed early on and hadn't worked."
"Anyway, so Gary had that. He'd written this operating system. But it was becoming clear that floppy disks were going to be an important part of computers; that this mag tape and punched cards weren't going to hack it. Gary had an operating system and he started licensing it. He licensed it to people like IMSAI and Digital Microsystems, and all of these companies that have totally disappeared."
[Note: the "somebody..who wrote a disk controller card" Was John Torode, who founded Digital Microsystems to sell those controllers with CP/M.]
Gordon later refers to a meeting with Kildall, after he graduated: "So I had a long argument with Gary in '77 that he should bundle the BASIC with the operating system and eliminate Microsoft, and he just wouldn't do it. We had a really heated argument about this. He said, “No, Bill would never do anything to hurt us. They send us all these customers. I can't really do that.” So anyway, nothing came of that.
Eubanks goes on: "In '81 we sold [Compiler Systems] to Digital Research, to Gary... Probably by 1981, he had 100, 200 people who had licensed [CP/M], including people like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox and companies like that. This is when people were really beginning to get intrigued by PCs, and Gary had done this from probably 1974 on. He'd been working in this, was interested in this whole area. Then the pivotal thing that everyone wants to know is, how come Digital Research didn't end up with the IBM contract for the operating system? There were three companies: Microsoft, there was VisiCorp, Microsoft of course run by Bill, VisiCorp by Terry Opdendyk, and Digital Research by Gary. So those are the three leading companies at the time, and anyone else was really distant. Those were big companies, you know, 10, 20, 30 million in revenue."
Gordon goes on to say that Dorothy Kildall dealt with OEM contracts, and so met with IBM. Kildall was delivering items to NorthStar at the time of that first meeting. "And even more ironic, the next day Gary and Dorothy were going on vacation. They flew to Florida with the team on the same airplane, they just happened to be on the same flight." Gordon goes on to say that Kildall was not interested in the business side of DRI; and Dorothy was a difficult person, and that Gary and Dorothy were "not the best team to work together".
Contact information:
Copyright © 2009 Herb Johnson