Why did you pick Gary Kildall rather than Bill Gates?
Gary Kildall is an innovator. Bill Gates is an absolutely brilliant businessman, but he’s not an innovator. The first part of Gates’s fortune is based on capitalizing on the invention belonging to Gary Kildall. Also, I didn’t want to tell stories people already knew. Bill Gates’s story is well known. I wanted to tell stories of some people whose contributions had been forgotten. That was Gary Kildall. He’s the father of the software industry. Also, I was attracted to people as democratizers. A lot of them didn’t do it for money. They were driven by other considerations. Gary had such an idealistic vision of what computers could do, and he didn’t want to become a monopolist. Q: In your short sidebar in the book about Gates, you say he never invented anything important. Hasn’t he made important contributions to the tech industry? A: A lot of people would argue that because his system was put into the PC, we had to endure a decade of crashes. We wouldn’t have had to deal with that if Kild
