Man Page Writing: Life/Times of Man Page Writer

When I joined Digital Research, maker of the CP/M operating system, in August 1982, the scuttlebutt was that, in spite of the our then-current momentum, DRI was, in the medium term, if not doomed, then facing a badly crimped future. To that point, the microcomputer industry was mainly a hobbyists' domain. IBM had acknowledged the industry's viability with its PC.

In spring or early summer of that very year, IBM had settled on MS-DOS as the OS for the PC, thereby consigning DRI to oblivion. The story of how this occurred is one of the more fecund legends of the computer industry's early days. The variation I have is, in few, that IBM really wanted to do business with DRI, but that Gary Kildall or his wife, Dorothy, or both, did not want to cede control of their "baby" to Big Blue--there are a dozen takes on who was to blame here--and that, as much in desperation as anything, IBM went to Microsoft and said, "Give us an OS." Microsoft didn't really have one ready, went to a garage-shop operation, Seattle Computing, and bought an OS (or at least critical pieces of same) from them. It was this OS that became PC-DOS and it was this blessing of Microsoft by IBM that laid the groundwork for the Microsoft monopoly.

DRI was left to compete with Microsoft on a very unequal footing. Each PC was shipped with the Microsoft OS. If you wanted CP/M, you'd have to lay out additional cash (I recall it being something like $40-60, in 1983 dollars), uninstall MS-DOS, and install CP/M. One does not have to be a marketing genius to see that this was a losing proposition for DRI.

Incidentally, CP/M was a vastly superior product to PC-DOS (as one might readily imagine), but, no matter. It's hard to compete when one product is free and convenient and the other neither of those things.

These old stories come to mind when I think about Sun giving away and open-sourcing Solaris. It's a great move. It also might be the only move.