Gary Kildall, 52, Crucial Player In Computer Development, Dies

By John Markoff
The New York Times

July 13, 1994

Gary Kildall, a pioneering computer scientist who created the first popular operating system for personal computers, died on Monday at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, Calif. He was 52.

An autopsy performed yesterday failed to determine the cause of death, said John DiCarlo, Monterey County's deputy coroner.

While teaching computer science at the United States Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey in 1973, Mr. Kildall wrote a personal computer operating system, a fundamental program that controlled the way the central processing unit stored and retrieved information from a floppy disk drive. He named the program Control Program/Monitor, or CP/M.

Before his program was available, inexpensive hobbyist microcomputers were generally programmed with a punched paper tape reader or by laboriously entering information by setting combinations of on-off switches to encode each byte.

Founding Digital Research

With his wife, Dorothy McEwen, Mr. Kildall founded a company to sell the CP/M operating system from their home in 1974. At first they called the company Intergalactic Digital Research, but the name was quickly shortened to Digital Research.

In 1977 Digital Research licensed CP/M to IMSAI, one of the early makers of personal computers. In the years afterward the program became the standard operating system for the first generation of 8-bit microcomputers.

Even before the invention of the electronic spreadsheet, these machines quickly became useful for business applications like word processing and relational databases, and by the early 1980's Digital Research's yearly revenues were $5 million.

Despite his business success, Mr. Kildall stayed on for several years as a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School because he enjoyed teaching.

Meeting With I.B.M.

In one of the most controversial events in the history of personal computing, Mr. Kildall was approached by I.B.M. in 1980 to develop a 16-bit version of CP/M for its new personal computer.

There is a legend in the computer industry that Mr. Kildall ignored the I.B.M. representatives who had arrived for a meeting and went flying in his airplane instead. But Mr. Kildall has said that in fact he attended the meeting and left believing that he had struck a deal with I.B.M.

In any case, I.B.M. executives later met with a small software company, the Microsoft Corporation, then located in Bellevue, Wash., founded by William Gates to sell his version of the BASIC computer language. Upon learning that I.B.M. was designing a personal computer, Mr. Gates, who at the time did not sell an operating system, rushed to buy one from a small Seattle company.

Eventually I.B.M. offered both Digital Research's CP/M-16 and Microsoft's MS-DOS operating systems with the I.B.M. PC. But it priced its version of the Microsoft operating system, PC-DOS, at $40 and the Digital Resarch operating system at $240.

PC-DOS quickly became the standard operating system for the I.B.M. PC, and when Compaq produced the first I.B.M.-compatible personal computer, MS-DOS became the industry standard. Microsoft eventually became the leading supplier of all kinds of personal computer software, and eventually broke with I.B.M. in a dispute over MS-DOS's successor operating system, OS2.

Many people in the computer industry argued that Microsoft's MS-DOS infringed on CP/M patents, but Mr. Kildall decided not to sue.

"In those days everyone was imitating everyone else," he said in a magazine interview several years ago. "That's why I didn't do anything about CP/M; it never occurred to me."

Mr. Kildall was widely viewed as a creative innovator in software design who disliked the cut-throat aspects of business and avoided many of the more aggressive tactics employed by his competitors in the computer industry.

Thomas Rolander, who was director of engineering for Digital Research when the company was approached by I.B.M., said he had flown with Mr. Kildall on the day of the I.B.M. meeting. He said he and Mr. Kildall arrived late at the meeting and refused to sign a nondisclosure document from the computer maker after the I.B.M. executives refused to sign a similar document presented by Digital Research.

Mr. Rolander said that several months later I.B.M. returned with an offer that included a royalty, but that I.B.M. had made the decision to price the two competing programs differently.

Mr. Kildall remained involved as chairman of Digital Research until the company was sold to Novell in 1991. He founded a second company in 1985 called Knowledge-Set to develop one of the first consumer applications for CD-ROM, a disc-based version of the Grolier Encyclopedia.

More recently, he moved to Austin, Tex., to found Prometheus Light and Sound, which is developing a "home PBX system."

Several years ago, he moved back to the Monterey area, where he began working on a book titled Computer Connections, a history of the computer industry. Mr. Kildall self-published the book earlier this year.

Mr. Kildall was born in Seattle and received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington. He and Ms. McEwen were married in 1962 and divorced in 1983. He is also survived by two children, Scott, of San Francisco , and Kristin, of Seattle, and by his mother, Emma, and sister, Patricia Guberlet, both of Seattle.