I apologise.  This is OFF-TOPIC.

It is the same as a message I posted in Operating Systems Discussion,
but I thought that it would be a good idea to put a bit of
history here, too (especially after the 64Kb story).

Cheers,
Clem

 -=> Quoting Tommy Usher to John Meroth <=-

 TU> factor could it?  Like it, or not, the simple fact is, Microsoft is a
 TU> successful company, and a lot of people can't stand that.

CC> I am not 100% sure of this, but didn't Microsoft sue Digital
CC>Research many years ago and stopped Gary Kildall's GEM or
CC> Windows look a like?
CC>
CC> You may not be aware that the man who invented the C prompt died
CC> a year of so ago. I have attached one of the messages I saved then.
CC>
CC> Here is part of that message as it refers to unfair
CC> Microsoft practices (don't forget the Stacker case either--
CC> -------------------------------------------

  "The first full-featured computer I ever owned, an Osborne
I, was CP/M-based.  I learned my way around on that system,
and when I finally switched to a DOS machine, it wasn't all
that different.
  "MS-DOS, after all, was basically just a variation of CP/M.
DOS featured the A, B and C prompts. Its philosophy and many
of its system commands were identical.
  "That was no surprise to Kildall, who told me that when he
examined the first version of MS-DOS he found many lines of
programming code that he recognized because he had written
them himself.
  "Kildall could have sued Microsoft, but IBM promised to
offer both PC-DOS (its version of MS-DOS) and CP/ M with its
IBM PCs. A lawsuit might have stalled what looked to Kildall
like a good marketing opportunity for CP/M.
  "There was a catch, though, and it doomed CP/M: IBM priced
PC-DOS at $40 and CP/M at $240. DOS was soon the industry
standard, and CP/M faded into obscurity."
	     -----------------------

Quite obviously, both companies acted dishonourably, and Kildall
is now dead.  You can draw your own conclusions.

Here is the full text
Cheers,
Clem Clarke

	     -----------------------
"USER FRIENDLY" for July 16, 1994
by Calvin Demmon

  ("User Friendly" runs each Saturday in the Monterey County Herald,
  Monterey, Calif.  It is also posted each week on the Marshall
  bulletin board -- phone number listed at bottom.)




		   GARY KILDALL'S WORK LIVES ON

  The inventor of the C-prompt is dead.

  When Gary Kildall's death this week at Community Hospital
of the Monterey Peninsula was reported, the stories focused,
quite properly, on his creation of the CP/M operating
system, a major contribution to the development of personal
computing.

  Most PC users no longer use CP/M, but everyone in the
DOS-compatible world still sees Kildall's work when DOS is
running on the screen.

  That little A, B, or C with the arrowpoint after it is the
way Kildall solved the problem of identifying disk drives on
a system. It's the kind of thing you take for granted if
you've been using it for years, but if it hadn't been for
Kildall, some other display might be on your screen at the
operating system level.

  I met Kildall a couple of times, in the course of
interviewing him for The Herald and for a San Francisco Bay
area computer magazine for which I wrote a story about his
forays into the then-uncharted world of CD-ROM.

I liked him very much. He was intelligent, friendly and
slyly humorous.

  And he was, first and foremost, a teacher. He had been a
professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate
School in Monterey when, in 1972, he wrote the first version
of CP/M. His professorial habits never left him even after
he became one of the most famous members of the personal
computing pantheon.

  If you happened to be standing near a blackboard, Kildall
couldn't resist picking up a piece of chalk and sketching
out charts and timelines and bell curves to illustrate
whatever he was saying. What he had to say was nearly always
fascinating.

  Digital Research, the company that Kildall founded,
brought hundreds of talented people to the Monterey area as
it expanded. For a time it seemed we might have a Silicon
Peninsula here, with Digital Research booming in Pacific
Grove and Lifetree Software producing Volkswriter in
Monterey.

But Lifetree is defunct, and Digital Research has been
absorbed into Novell.  Digital Research never quite
recovered from IBM's anointing of MS-DOS instead of CP/M as
the operating system for its personal computers, and none of
Digital's other products were ever so important or so
universal as CP/M had been.

  The first full-featured computer I ever owned, an Osborne
I, was CP/M-based.  I learned my way around on that system,
and when I finally switched to a DOS machine, it wasn't all
that different.

  MS-DOS, after all, was basically just a variation of CP/M.
DOS featured the A, B and C prompts. Its philosophy and many
of its system commands were identical.

  That was no surprise to Kildall, who told me that when he
examined the first version of MS-DOS he found many lines of
programming code that he recognized because he had written
them himself.

  Kildall could have sued Microsoft, but IBM promised to
offer both PC-DOS (its version of MS-DOS) and CP/ M with its
IBM PCs. A lawsuit might have stalled what looked to Kildall
like a good marketing opportunity for CP/M.

  There was a catch, though, and it doomed CP/M: IBM priced
PC-DOS at $40 and CP/M at $240. DOS was soon the industry
standard, and CP/M faded into obscurity.

  But CP/M isn't dead.

  Thursday, when I checked the comp.os.cpm newsgroup on the
Usenet network (via the Internet), there were 30 fresh
messages relating to CP/M.

  Most were plaintive cries for help with ancient CP/M-based
computers bearing names such as Amstrad, CompuPro, Kaypro
and Cromemco.

  And about half-a-dozen folks had posted messages reporting
Kildall's death, including one Silicon Valley type who
included (in the kind of copyright violation that is typical
in cyberspace) the complete Kildall obituary from the San
Jose Mercury.

Among the other messages was one titled "Wanted: CP/M Boot
Disk." What that guy wanted was what Gary Kildall created 22
years ago, and what we all wanted not long ago -- the key
piece of software that made the personal computer revolution
not only possible but inevitable.

---