Gary Arlen Kildall was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur. The Computer History Museum records that “in 1974, he invented CP/M, the first operating system that could run on these new desktop platforms,” and that he and his wife Dorothy founded Digital Research, Inc. in Pacific Grove, California, as the vehicle for commercializing his work.
Kildall’s technical contributions went beyond a single program. The museum notes that “soon after, he created the BIOS, which enabled CP/M to easily interface with different computer hardware.” That separation of hardware-specific code from the rest of the system let CP/M run across the many incompatible machines of the early microcomputer era, which is why it became the industry standard for 8-bit business computers.
In 1993, the year before his death, Kildall wrote a draft memoir titled “Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the Evolution of the Personal Computer Industry.” He distributed bound copies to family and friends. The Computer History Museum, with the permission of his children Scott and Kristin, later made part of that manuscript available.
Kildall is often remembered for the IBM PC operating-system deal that went to Microsoft instead of to Digital Research. The Computer History Museum and Kildall’s children push back on the popular framing: they note “the myth that he ‘missed’ the opportunity to become Bill Gates by going flying instead of meeting with IBM,” a “tall tale” that they say unfairly reduces a major inventor to a “could-have-been.”