Today was the first day of the “Euromicro 1980” conference, which has left surprisingly
little mark on the computer industry. I had come from Germany mainly to hear the hero of
the microcomputer industry, Gary
Kildall. And how about that, at lunch time they hadn't even thought fit to feed him—the
other delegates were fed as part of the conference registration. I had a talk with the
organizers, and rather reluctantly they let him eat with us. I spent all the lunch asking
him silly questions, and in the end really hadn't learnt anything new.
Another US speaker was a no-show: somebody
called Bill Gates, a name that I had
genuinely not heard before, though of course I knew his company Microsoft. Instead he sent
somebody else (David L. Taylor) to talk about their new operating
system, XENIX. The talk was interesting,
but who could afford the hardware to run a version
of Unix?
Of course, this was an interesting time. Many legends relate to an incident when Gary
Kildall “went flying”, while Bill Gates stayed at home and negotiated with IBM on the one hand and Seattle Computer Products on the
other. The result was that Microsoft bought the rights to SCP's 86-DOS and licensed them to
IBM for use in their upcoming 5150
“personal computer”. I first found out about this in late 1980, maybe a month or two later,
as I have noted. For a long time
I interpreted the somewhat murky details of Kildall going flying while Bill Gates stayed at
home to refer to this conference, and I wondered what would have happened if Gary had also
stayed behind rather than anwsering my questions about why PIP was so
slow? Unfortunately, the details that have since emerged suggest that this interpretation
was incorrect. It reminds me of the old saying:
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant... and wrong.
It came in two pieces, the indicator unit (shown) and a thoroughly boring looking power
supply, which I managed to leave behind
in Reading, and had to return there the
following day to pick it up.
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