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| Top row: Steve Wood (left), Bob Wallace, Jim Lane. Middle row: Bob O'Rear, Bob Greenberg, Marc McDonald, Gordon Letwin. Bottom row: Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood, Paul Allen. December 7, 1978. |
Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates, was awarded an honorary knighthood by Britain's Queen Elizabeth on Wednesday for his outstanding contribution to enterprise.
When the knighthood was announced last year (it's the British Prime Minister who approves the selection rather than the Queen) Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said:"(Gates) is one of the most important business leaders of his age. Microsoft technology has transformed business practices and his company has had a profound impact on the British economy."
Bill Gates is certainly one of the significant businessmen of our age but it is often claimed that he and his colleagues were more brilliant at execution than invention. In a recent feature on Apple in the US magazine BusinessWeek, Steve Jobs said that Microsoft's Windows software had been copied from Mac software.
The PC Operating System
Most people in an answer to the question, who invented the light bulb, would say Thomas Edison. It would be wrong. The invention of the operating system, which ushered in the PC revolution is more recent but how many would know who was responsible for it?
Last October, a book titled They Made America, was published in the US. It is authored by former editor of the UK Sunday Times Harold Evans and profiles 70 American innovators. It has been published to coincide with a related series on the US public television channel PBS.
Harold Evans gives the credit for inventing the PC operating system to Gary Kindall, (1942-1994) founder of Digital Research.
Kindall had a computer PhD and created the first personal computer operating system, CP/M. His insight was that by creating an operating system separate from the hardware, applications could run on computers that were made by different manufacturers. The CP/M operating system had sold well and IBM, the world’s then biggest computer company was looking for a system for its planned Personal Computer. IBMers visited the 24 year old Bill Gates at Microsoft in August 1980 but Gates was unable to supply them with a system and he directed them to Kindall.
Kindall met with IBM but he was reluctant to agree to the onerous conditions of a non-disclosure agreement relating to confidentiality but there was apparently an oral agreement. On August 28, 1980, Microsoft signed an agreement with IBM to develop software for the PC. Gates was aware of an operating system called QDOS, which had been developed by a fellow Seattle resident named Tim Paterson. Microsoft bought QDOS for $50,000. QDOS, which was similar to CP/M was renamed DOS and improved by Microsoft.
It was a year before Kindall discovered that his longtime friend Bill Gates had signed the plum deal with IBM and to add insult to injury, it looked that parts of QDOS had been copied from CP/M. Software copyright was in its infancy and rather than take IBM to court, Kindall agreed to license CP/M to IBM. He was shocked when IBM charged $240 per copy for CP/M and only $40 for DOS. The rest is history, which is generally written by the victors.
Two years before his death in 1994, following a fall from a bar stool, Kindall was invited by the University of Washington to attend the 25th anniversary of its computer science programme. He was one of its earliest and most distinguished graduates but Harvard dropout Bill Gates was chosen as the keynote speaker.
In his unpublished memoir, Kindall wrote: "Well, it seems to me that he did have an education to get there. It happened to be mine, not his."
