When Fate Came Calling, He Wasn't Home

Style

Appreciation

John Schwartz, Staff Writer
The Washington Post

July 15, 1994

There are moments when the world could go either way, destiny suspended for a coin toss.

The road not taken, the lips not kissed; the result can be the opportunity of a lifetime or a lifetime of regret.

Gary Kildall, who died in Monterey, Calif., Sunday night at age 52, was part of one of those moments in 1980 - and became a legend in computerdom for losing out to a scrawny kid named Bill Gates. If he had grabbed the brass ring, he might have ended up where Gates, the billionaire CEO of Microsoft Corp., is today.

Instead, The Legend goes, he went flying.

Kildall was present at the birth of the personal computer revolution. Way back in 1972 he had written software to help people program early microprocessors - what would become the "brains" of personal computers. A soft-spoken computer science professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Pacific Grove, Calif., Kildall was drawn to the field before there was even a market. He was a "hacker" in the truest sense. He played with computer code for the challenge and the fun of it.

One of the things Kildall played around with was software that could help those primordial microprocessors communicate with other devices - the gizmos that let you shuttle data in and out of the chip, from paper-tape readers to disk drives - and to manage the computer's memory. This kind of software is known as an operating system, and Kildall called his CP/M, for Control Program/Monitor.

(He never was very good with catchy names: The first shingle for his company read Intergalactic Digital Research, later shortened to Digital Research.)

Anyway, this is where The Legend takes over. By 1981, Kildall was getting rich: His $10 million company had sold 250,000 copies of his brainchild. But that year, IBM was wading into the market. Still devoted to its massive mainframe machines, the computer giant had deigned to come out with a personal computer of its own. To speed the process in this pesky little segment, it chose to buy much of the critical technology - like operating systems - from outsiders.

IBM contacted Kildall about licensing CP/M.

But Kildall and his first wife, Dorothy McEwen - who provided Digital Research with much of its business sense and was largely responsible for its early financial success - were uncomfortable with the one-sided secrecy agreements IBM always made its business partners sign and the flat-fee agreement the company preferred.

So on the day of the big meeting with visiting IBM executives, Kildall, an avid pilot, supposedly decided to go flying instead, thumbing his nose at the Big Blue suits.

The shunned IBMers flew up to Seattle and cut a deal with Gates, who was already under contract to come up with programming languages for the new IBM box. He quickly produced MS-DOS and lined up other major manufacturers behind his product. It became the operating system that ate the world and helped make Gates a billionaire several times over.

The story of that fateful flight grew over time, fueled by a lively retelling in the book "Fire in the Valley" by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine - and in no small part by Gates himself.

Gates's three-word summation of the incident - "Gary went flying" - became an internal metaphor at Microsoft for missed opportunities. It still seemed to be on his mind in 1991 when he told the Seattle Business Journal, "Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company."

Kildall always disputed that version of the story, insisting that he was flying on business, not for fun. He even contended that he actually made it back for the tail end of the meeting - a fact that none of the IBM executives present happened to recall, said Stephen Manes, coauthor of a respected biography of Gates. "It's the computer industry's `Rashomon,' " Manes said.

Whatever the truth, there's no way around the fact that Kildall blew the sale.

IBM would eventually license CP/M from Kildall, but the company sold it for $240 a copy, compared with MS-DOS's bargain price of $40.

CP/M sank.

Ultimately, Manes said, "Kildall was a better technical guy than he was a businessman, whereas Bill Gates was a better businessman than he was a technical guy." Kildall called himself a "gadget-oriented person" in a 1981 interview, admitting, "I'm not a very competitive person."

The Legend has branded Gary Kildall a failure. But, Manes said, "this is not a loser. It's just not the guy who came in first. ... Americans don't like people who come in second. But that sure beats coming in last." As with many of the pioneers in his industry, Kildall's early success made him wonderfully wealthy. It allowed him the freedom to explore other ventures - he kicked off one of the first companies to develop the combination of image, sound and text applications based on compact discs that are now sweeping the consumer market.

And when he sold Digital Research to computer network giant Novell in 1991, the stock swap was valued at $80 million.

We should all fail so well.

PHOTO-MUG Caption: GARY KILDALL