Gary Kildall

"It was Gary's bad luck that put him up against the most skilled businessman of all time. Anyone looks like a failure standing next to Bill Gates."

"The ALGOL compiler was probably one of the nicest pieces of code to come out at that time. I spent hours trying to fix and change the compiler. Working with it so closely affected the way I think abou…"

"Ask Bill why the string in function 9 is terminated by a dollar sign. Ask him, because he can't answer. Only I know that."

"You need to study other people's work. Their approaches to problem solving and the tools they use give you a fresh way to look at your own work."

"I expected too much of educators. I expected them to understand, in a sense, the sugar-coated concepts of LISP used in AI that were embodied in the Logo language. It was then that I learned that compu…"

"When we failed to produce an operating system in a timely manner, Glenn started talking with Gary about CPM, which Gary had written for Intel under contract. It took several months of twisting Gary's …"

"I've told this story to lots of people and they just won't get it. All they want to get is that IBM showed up and Gary was off flying his aeroplane. The problem is that this is very wrong.… The real i…"

"It's fun to sit at a terminal and let the code flow. It sounds strange, but it just comes out my brain; once I'm started, I don't have to think about it."