They made America
An illustrated history of American innovators--some well known, some unknown, and all fascinating-- by the author of the bestselling The American Century.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
8mentions
8people
2007–2026years
63% recommend38% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Killdall viewed it as a serious question, at the least.
The best source I've seen for Kildall's viewpoint is his chapter in the book They Made America. It quotes sections on this dispute from his unpublished memoir (his children later allowed the Computer History Museum to publicly release a portion of the book, but not the part that They Made America quotes from). Kildall was angry that DOS was API compatible with CP/M, and seems to have believed that this constituted a copyright violation:
> “Paterson was not writing a computer application according to DRI specs, i.e., cooking from a recipe. He was creating a derived work based on the cookbook copyrighted by someone else. When Paterson wrote QDOS with Kildall’s manuals “at his side” (in the words of Gary Rivlin in The Plot to Get Bill Gates), he was using materials marked on every page: “All Information Contained Herein is Proprietary to Digital Research.”
> “So that software developers would know how to write programs for its still-secret project, IBM had to let selected programmers have a list of API function calls. Kildall was angry to find how much of CP/M’s proprietary list appeared there. He had no idea IBM had a deal with Gates. He was just upset that IBM itself seemed to have copied his interfaces. In his unpublished memoir he says he furiously got through to IBM. They immediately dispatched a manager and an attorney to Pacific Grove. “I showed the IBM attorney definitive evidence that PC-DOS was a clone of CP/M and immediately threatened a lawsuit for copyright infringement. The IBM attorney compared the API interface, and I can say clearly that he fairly blanched at the comparison and stated that he was not aware of the similarity. I told him that he should take note and become aware at the earliest opportunity, or else he should face a major lawsuit.”
> “By the time he wrote his memoir, Kildall saw the decision not to sue as a fateful error. He grew increasingly irate about the similarity of PC-DOS and CP/M. He writes: “The first twenty-six function calls of the API in Gates’s PC-DOS are identical to and taken directly from the CP/M proprietary documents [CP/M manuals].” Then he poses a challenge for his old friend. “If you think Bill Gates invented those function calls, ask him why print string (function 9) ends with a dollar sign. He will not know.”
> “What Paterson essentially did was rewrite the bottom part of the software—improving the way files were stored and adapting the program to a 16-bit machine—while copying most of the top part of Kildall’s operating system interfacing mechanisms. Even if QDOS and CP/M were 80 percent different, as Paterson has insisted, he took almost unaltered Kildall’s interrupt mechanism—the key innovation.”
> “To demonstrate how far Paterson mimicked CP/M’s interface, the first 36 Int-21 functions, Kildall’s memoir devotes an appendix to comparing the sequence and language of CP/M and those of QDOS and MS-DOS. A few words were changed. Kildall’s “Read Sequential” function became “Sequential Read”; “write sequential” became “sequential write”; “Read Random” was called “Random Read.” And so on.
At the time Kildall wrote his memoir, and when Harold Evans wrote They Made America, the question of whether APIs are copyrightable had not been answered. However, Google v. Oracle has settled that writing an implementation of someone else's API is fair use.
- Poor Charlie's Almanac -- can't beat Charlie Munger when it comes to explaining how the world works.
Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile -- Nassim Taleb reviles lots of new ways to think, first in finance, then everything in later books.
The Origin of Wealth -- Similar to Antifragile with a lot of mental models packed in on many different subjects: economics, business, biology, ...
The Design of Everyday Things -- the bible of design. Read it to know why everyday frustrations with tech are probably not your fault. His book Emotional Design is a good compliment.
The Essential Drucker -- "essential" reading for anyone in management or scaling a startup.
History, and why the world is the way it is today:
Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
The Birth of Plenty, William Bernstein
They Made America, Harold Evans -- fantastic history book with each chapter telling the detailed story of a businessperson or inventor in U.S. history
- The War of Art (again) - I reread this book at least once a year. IMHO one of the best books ever written on the creative process, no matter what you're creating.
In Defense of Food - Best criticism of the problems with reductionist "nutrition-ism" I've read.
They Made America - Good, quick history of some of America's most revolutionary inventors, businessmen and women.
- In this related page http://www.triz-journal.com/archives/what_is_triz/ they write that "Somebody someplace has already solved this problem (or one very similar to it.); Creativity is now finding that solution and adapting it to this particular problem."
I think this is a good method. See for instance this book From steam engine to search engine http://www.amazon.com/They-Made-America-Centuries-Innovators... listing 2 centuries of innovations.
- > Empirically the answer seems to be that working hard is a necessary if not sufficient condition
I think the empirical evidence overwhelmingly indicates that connections are way more important than working hard. The majority of rich people got there mostly by knowing the right powerful and well positioned people. Modern tech is anomalous regarding the value of hard work and skill. It also accounts for a small fraction of the wealthy.
Carnegie wrote explicitly against hard work and in favor of the value of networks. I'm sure the other robber barons agreed.
Read "They Made America" and see page after page of brilliant inventors of the last 200 years who died broke, but whose inventions produced fortunes for other well positioned people.
- I worked with Stewart for several years on a play on Gary Kildall. He would drive down from the Bay Area and I would drive up from the Monterey Peninsula and we would meet in inbetween towns such as Watsonville, Morgan Hill or Gilroy, and work on the manuscript. We did this until Covid struck, then stopped because of Stewart's health, connecting mainly through the internet or phone. . I had written the play first on my own, and he saw it and contacted me and after we met a couple times I asked him if he wanted co-authorship and he said he did. I had called the play A Mild Concussion, because that's what Gary had been diagnosed with after the fall in the Franklin Street Bar and Grill in Monterey. Also, I didn't use real names. Stewart wanted to, so we did, and changed the title to The Forgotten Computer Genius, a title he liked. I have emails from Stewart discussing the play. It is set in the final few days of his life, as he nurses his injury and tries to recall to a friend, a woman, all that has happened. The play, which was praised, after reading, by Sir Harold Evans, the late author of They Made America, which includes an incisive chapter on Kildall, and is ready for production - Steve Hauk.
