Kildall

[Jim Arnott]

I subscribe to a delightful periodical called "The American Heritage of 
Invention & Technology." The current issue has an article entitled, 
"They Made America," an interview with Harold Evans, the author of the 
book by the same name.  It has this to say about Gary Kildall,

I&T: Do you have a favorite person? Or favorite story?

Evans: "Well, I think Gary Kildall is the most abused of all the 
innovators. In justice to him, to his memory, his is the most monstrous 
story in the book. We all of us today benefit from Gary Kildall's 
innovations, and they were basically snitched from him. He was betrayed 
by IBM. He should be celebrated instead of forgotten, and he is the one 
I feel the strongest about.

"He suffered from pure idealism. He believed that his operating system 
-- which was the basis of Bill Gates's fortune and the IBM PC -- should 
not be exploited to achieve a monopoly of applications. By himself he 
laid the foundations for the software industry. He would not have gone 
into word processing and spreadsheets and the like because he believed 
that would have yielded an overweening monopoly. And he's been proved 
absolutely right."