Gary Kildall; His Software System Lost to Rival MS-DOS

Gary Kildall, who created the first popular operating system for personal computers only to lose out to Microsoft’s now standard MS-DOS program, is dead at age 52.

An autopsy failed to determine the cause of Kildall’s death on Monday at Community Hospital, the Monterey County coroner’s office said.

In 1973, Kildall wrote his personal computer operating system, Control Program-Monitor, a fundamental program that controls how information is stored and retrieved from a floppy disk drive.

To sell it, Kildall and his then-wife, Dorothy McEwen, in 1974 formed a company that came to be known as Digital Research.

In 1980, Kildall was approached by IBM to develop the operating system for its personal computers. He thought he had struck a deal, but IBM later met with William Gates, founder of the then-small software company Microsoft Corp.

IBM eventually offered personal computers with either the CP-M operating system from Digital Research or MS-DOS from Microsoft. But it priced Microsoft’s version at $40 and Digital’s at $240.

MS-DOS eventually became the industry standard and Gates is ranked as one of the richest men in the United States.

Many in the industry alleged that MS-DOS infringed on CP-M patents, but Kildall didn’t sue.

“In those days everyone was imitating everyone else,” Kildall explained several years ago. “That’s why I didn’t do anything about CP-M; it never occurred to me.”

In a 1981 interview, Kildall said: “Basically, I am a gadget-oriented person. I like to work with gadgets, dials and knobs. I’m not a very competitive person. I’m forced into it.”

In 1985, Kildall founded the company Knowledge-Set to develop one of the first consumer applications for CD-ROM, a compact disc system that stores large amounts of information.

Digital Research was sold to Novell in 1991 in a stock-swap deal valued at $80 million.

Kildall, a Seattle native, received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington.