
Gary Kildall and Collegial Entrepreneurship (1997) - ontouchstart
http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/gary-kildall-and-collegial-entrepreneurs/184410428
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ontouchstart
Got interested in Gary Kidall after reading this

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12220091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12220091)

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dasmoth
A great read, thanks for digging this up.

One thing that struck me was the comment that

>>> Unlike operating systems before and since, CP/M was not the result of
years of research by a team of software engineers.

To me, 1997 seems like it was still the tail end of the microcomputer era,
when such things were considered possible (and some of the microcomputer-era
diversity remained -- that was the era of BeOS, for example). Today, there
seems to be active antipathy to solo coders in many professional settings. I
feel something has been lost.

~~~
digi_owl
You are probably not far of in that assessment. The Amiga 1200 and 4000 had
been discontinued just the year before.

Windows NT 4.0 had been out for just a year (it was the version that
introduced the 9x UI to NT).

On the hardware side we had Pentium and Pro/II shipping, and also the first
AMD cpu without any Intel microcode involved (K5).

~~~
dasmoth
In the UK, Acorn Computers were just hanging on (and working on one last RISC
OS machine -- which sadly never saw the light of day). At least their CPU
architecture lives on, which is more than can be said for many of their
competitors.

~~~
digi_owl
Funny thing about the UK micros is that just about the only one i am familiar
with in the Amstrad CPC, because several of my classmates got one in the
second hand market.

