

The man who could have been richer than Bill Gates - acangiano
http://www.freeenterpriseland.com/BOOK/KILDALL.html

======
Tichy
Frustrating that even if you make more than 100 million dollars, you can still
be bitter because somebody else made a couple of billion dollars.

I hope I wouldn't be like that. There is the aspect of recognition (who was
the first to invent X), but in these modern times it is probably a good idea
to realize that the concept of the sole inventor is overrated.

~~~
marcofloriano
Nope ... it´s not about the money, it´s about yourself, the opportunity that
you lost. Money, after some stage, is just a reflex of your ability to make
more money. The ability of making money was probably the reason that bring him
down. After all he is a business man ...

If i was him, i would be bad too, but my life is not based on that, is based
on God ... so i could survive. After all, i guess the best lost for him was
his wife, what, probably, screwed with him.

------
larryfreeman
Title is misleading but story is very interesting.

Gary Kildall sold his company to Novel for $120 million so he did fine
financially.

Even if Kildall had made the deal with IBM, it is questionable what would have
happened. After all, he eventually did make a deal with IBM and it didn't
matter.

The end of the story is a stretch. It is hard for me to believe that all the
bad things happened to him because of the IBM deal.

~~~
forinti
Exactly. He had great business at the time, so he had a lot to lose. Gates had
nothing, so his bet made a lot more sense. With what they knew, they probably
both made the best choice.

------
sammcd
The moral of the original Kildall Story is that you must always agree to be
nice to big important companies like IBM. I love that this isn't true anymore.

~~~
whughes
I wish you luck getting anywhere on the Internet without the help of a major
company, Google in particular. It may not be Microsoft or IBM, but there are
still clear powers.

------
edw519
Maybe Gary Kildall would have had more success if he had a relative on the
inside. Any treatment of the IBM/Microsoft deal without any mention of Mary
Gates is misleading and incomplete...

<http://www.virtualaltair.com/virtualaltair.com/mits0026.asp>

"Fate smiled on Microsoft twice in these proceedings. First, IBM was somewhat
leery of dealing with what they considered a somewhat flakey tiny software
company, but it turns out that in addition to Microsoft's proven reputation as
a viable language vendor, Mary Gates - Bill's mom - had served on the national
board of United Way with one of the involved IBM senior executives - providing
the validating social reference that they were working with "Mary's Gates' boy
Bill".

[http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-
gates-64-h...](http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-
gates-64-helped-her-son-start-
microsoft.html?n=Top%2FNews%2FBusiness%2FCompanies%2FInternational%20Business%20Machines%20\(I.B.M.\))

"Mary Gates, a prominent Seattle businesswoman who helped her son, William H.
Gates 3d, get the contract that led to a lucrative relationship with I.B.M.
for his fledgling Microsoft Corporation..."

[http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...](http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19940610&slug=1914904)

"Mrs. Gates also figured in her son's success. She helped cement Microsoft's
early connection with IBM, which led to development of the IBM PC with DOS, an
operating system supplied by Microsoft. When someone mentioned Microsoft to
IBM President John Opel in 1980, Opel responded, "Oh, that's run by Bill
Gates, Mary Gates' son." Opel served with Mrs. Gates on United Way's national
board at the time."

~~~
jerf
Contingent on the story at the link being effectively true, it sounds like
your first paragraph is just a bad lead in to airing a pet peeve of yours,
because the logic does not follow. While that explains why IBM contacted Bill
first for no apparent reason, the story says that Bill did the right thing and
redirected them to Kildall. Kildall had a fair shot at the deal, but passed it
up.

Again, contingent on the story being effectively true, there is no way Kildall
was going to get that deal, family relationship on Bill's part or no family
relationship. He saw it more as a distraction than an opportunity.

(It's a pity he became bitter because it sounds like he already had "fuck you"
money; _I_ certainly don't have a yacht or personal airplane or any of the
several other things he had. If you ask me the truly sad part of the tale is
that Kildall was owned by his possessions.)

------
axod
I remember the first time I ran DR-DOS. It was so superior to MS-DOS it wasn't
funny. It's a shame it didn't have the strategy to kill MS-DOS off.

------
timothychung
A similar story by Business Week:
[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_43/b3905109_...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_43/b3905109_mz063.htm)

~~~
rms
The BW story reads like an unsourced reduction of the freeenterpriseland
article.

The author of the FEL article sells an ebook made up of similar stories, which
you can read a lot of on the site homepage. The ebook costs $5.
<http://www.freeenterpriseland.com/MAG.html>

It's an interesting technique for writing and selling an ebook, but with no
links to sources it is worse than the linkjack, it is plagiarism.

------
bena
Obviously, he couldn't have been richer than Bill Gates because he isn't. From
this story it seems like he had many of the same opportunities as Gates, but
didn't know how to leverage them into something more. If he had Gates's
intuition and insight into the early software industry he might have made the
same moves.

But then again, if he had Micheal Jordan's skill in basketball he could have
won more championships than others as well.

------
quizbiz
"could'a should'a would'a"

~~~
Tichy
That hardly seems like a fair assessment, given all the work Kildall has done.

------
wglb
Now there is some argument bait--who is the better programmer, Bill Gates or
Gary Kildall.

~~~
acangiano
Gary was probably a better programmer. Bill is undoubtedly better from a
business standpoint.

~~~
gustavo_duarte
Gates is rumored to have scored a perfect 800 on the math portion or his SAT.
He was studying Math at Harvard and published a paper in 'Discrete
Mathematics' despite having dropped out before finishing undergrad:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V00-45JC8FY-54&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=2f3c6366c54665187a1f58bf75396d13)
(pay wall, but you can see the abstract)

I think there's reason to believe he could have been an outstanding
programmer. Has anybody read the source code for a program verifiably written
by Gates? Was Donkey.bas really written by him?

~~~
fuzzmeister
I do not know enough about his background to say one way or another whether he
was a great programmer, but getting an 800 on the SAT math section isn't
exactly a legendary achievement. It is weighted so that the number of people
getting an 800 is not insignificant.

~~~
nostrademons
That was less true when Gates took it than it is now. Now, scores are
"recentered", so you can get a couple questions wrong and still get a perfect
800. This wasn't true when Gates took it - perfect meant perfect then.

At my undergrad, something like 1 in 10 incoming freshmen had perfect SAT
scores, and I know a couple of folks at Google with perfect scores as well.

~~~
dgordon
"That was less true when Gates took it than it is now. Now, scores are
"recentered", so you can get a couple questions wrong and still get a perfect
800."

Not true, for the math anyway. You can get a few wrong on the verbal section
and still get an 800, and don't ask me how the writing works.

In any case, the effects of the 1994 recentering on higher-end scores (for
whatever they're worth) are greatly exaggerated.

------
jasonlbaptiste
"Bill Gates greatest skill is to give people what they want."

~~~
soult
Well, actually his greatest skill is to give people something and make them
believe it is what they want.

~~~
nostrademons
Isn't that the same thing? What's the difference between wanting something and
_believing_ you want it? Doesn't one imply the other?

(Note: we're talking about wants here, not needs. It's quite possible to
believe you need something and be mistaken. But wants are subjective beliefs,
so almost by definition, wouldn't believing you want something mean that you
do want it?)

~~~
mighty
Snake oil. False advertising. Advertising that stokes and intensifies desires
far beyond the point at which they would exist sans advertising. Wanting a
marshmallow now vs. two marshmallows later. Pepsi doing better on one-off
taste tests, Coke doing better when consuming a 12-pack. Buying into the hype
for something and deceiving yourself into believing it delivered.
Misinterpretation. Projection. Insufficient information.

