February 6, 2005
Yesterday marked
the end of an era which, for many of us, began in the mid-1970's.
I, along with
many of the fellow members of my "Digital Research" family, attended a memorial
service for Dorothy McEwen who died last week of brain cancer and, who along
with Gary Kildall, founded the company originally known as "Intergalactic
Digital Research" that changed how hundreds of millions of people live and
work.
Gary and Dorothy
started DRI in the garage out back of their home on Bayview Avenue in Pacific
Grove, a quiet, coastal village who's motto is "The Last Hometown". Over nearly
two decades, DRI, starting with the invention of the personal computer operating
system (and it's one quantum leap idea, the BIOS) not only pioneered many of the
technologies we take for granted today it also grew to be the largest employer
on the Monterey Peninsula with, at it's height, over 600 employees.
Gary was the
quintessential software "folk hero". He loved to code, he lived to code.
Dorothy had the ultimate complimentary skills and built a business around Gary's
creations.
I started a
small company with my first wife, Nancy, in 1979 to build Pascal compilers and
in late 1981 we received an offer from Gary and Dorothy to "join forces" and so
we were "acquired" and moved, along with our amazingly capable assistant, Patie
McCracken, north to join DRI. We were employees 61, 62 and 63.
What we had no
idea of was that we would find an amazing family of people with whom we would
share what turned out to be history.
Those of us who
starting writing software in the late 1960's and early 1970's always wanted to
spend more and more time with our computers than we could either afford or were
allowed.
Thirty years ago
computers came in one or more 6-foot tall equipment racks, had to live in
specially air-conditioned rooms and, unless you were very lucky, or very rich,
had to be shared with others.
The overarching
mood of the time was "I wish I could have one all to myself!"
What Gary and
Dorothy did was to enable that revolution. Gary's invention of the BIOS that
allowed a nearly infinite variety of hardware implementations to run CP/M and
Dorothy's marketing acumen and management skills that allowed them to grow a
business based on a product that cost $70 (retail) and $50,000 for an unlimited
OEM license, enabled those of us who just couldn't wait, to build our hardware,
write a BIOS and, most importantly of all, share our work with other people.
To this day
there are still people running CP/M on both real hardware and emulators. When
you fire up a DOS prompt on your PC you still see the familiar C> prompt we all
were thrilled to see when our first BIOS worked. Actually, it was an A> prompt
because we had two 8-inch floppy disk drives (if we were lucky) called A and B
and C didn’t' come along until you got a hard disk.
My personal
"CP/M Moment" came in February of 1977. I was a hardware hacker and software
developer and had built a number of microcomputer systems and was considering
building a floppy disk controller for my IMSAI 8080 (#7 from the second
production run) which I had bought and built a year earlier. At that time the
magazine to read for digital circuit hackers was called Electronic Engineering
Times. When I saw a small classified advertisement for a floppy disk operating
system, CP/M 1.0, for $70 I hopefully sent off my check to PO BOX 579, Pacific
Grove, California, a place, from my viewpoint in a snowy February in Iowa,
seemed like a million miles away.
About a week
later I got my two diskettes and 3 stapled together manuals and I was
off-and-running. I think I must have written nearly 50 CP/M BIOS
implementations between 1977 and 1983 and the day I saw my own home-built floppy
disk controller bring up that A> prompt it was indescribable.
I am indebted to
Dorothy and Gary for their vision and courage. But most importantly I am
grateful for their spirit which continues to inspire me and the fellow members
of the DRI family every single day.
1:35:05 PM 
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