Gary Kildall - Personal Life

Personal Life

Kildall's colleagues recall him as creative, easygoing, and adventurous. In addition to flying, he loved sports cars, auto racing, and boating, and he had a lifelong love of the sea.

Although Kildall preferred to leave the IBM affair in the past and to be known for his work before and afterward, he continually faced comparisons between himself and Bill Gates as well as fading memories of his contributions. A legend grew around the fateful IBM-DRI meeting (encouraged by Gates and various journalists), suggesting that Kildall had irresponsibly taken the day off for a recreational flight, and he tired of constantly having to refute that story. In later years, he had occasional private expressions of bitterness over being upstaged by Microsoft.

Kildall was particularly annoyed when the University of Washington asked him, as a distinguished graduate, to attend their computer science program anniversary in 1992, but gave the keynote speech to Gates, a dropout from Harvard. In response he started writing his memoir, Computer Connections. The memoir, which he distributed only to a few friends, expressed his frustration that people did not seem to value elegance in software, and it said of Gates, "He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry." In an appendix he called DOS "plain and simple theft" because its first 26 system calls worked the same as CP/M's. He accused IBM of contriving the price difference between PC-DOS and CP/M-86 in order to marginalize CP/M.

Harold Evans used the memoir as a source for a chapter about Kildall in the 2004 book They Made America, concluding that Microsoft had robbed Kildall of his inventions. IBM veterans from the PC project disputed the book's description of events, and Microsoft described it as "one-sided and inaccurate."

Selling DRI to Novell had made Kildall a wealthy man, and he moved to the West Lake Hills suburb of Austin. His Austin house was a lakeside property, with stalls for several sports cars, plus a video studio in the basement. Kildall owned and flew his own Learjet private jet airplane and had at least one boat on the lake. While in Austin he also participated in volunteer efforts to assist children with HIV/AIDS. He owned a mansion with a panoramic ocean view in Pebble Beach, California, near the headquarters of DRI.