On a residential block in the seaside town of Pacific Grove, California, it's a modest house with a grand history. Behind its garage in a small carriage house, one of the seminal events in personal computing history to place. The first modern operating system for the microcomputer was born here over 20 years ago. It was called CPM, and its inventor was a young computer science teacher named Gary Kildall. Kildall had started developing his control program for microcomputers, also known as control program monitor in the early 1970s when he realized the potential for a general purpose small computer. He was carrying a portable computer at a time when the desktop PC was just a dream. I met Gary in 1973 in the computer science lab late one evening. He was a young kid, freckled, reddish hair, boyish enthusiasm was in cutoffs, came into the computer center with a leather briefcase that he flipped open and connected to a teletype, an ASR-33, and that was an entire self-contained computer. It was the first person of a computer I ever saw, and I went wild. I wanted to know where he got it, how he got what he was doing with it, how I could get one. Gary studied computer science at the University of Washington and went on to obtain a doctorate. He soon moved to the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, where he later became a professor. In the 1970s, the seeds of CPM were planted during his teaching career at Monterey and continued to work on the project at home, and later in this tiny rooftop office, above a restaurant in Pacific Grove. The first thing I heard that Gary did that was really brought to my attention. He invented a programming language called PLM and implemented it for the Intel microprocessors to prove that the 8080-80 was a real computer and not a controller for microwave ovens, but that it was a real computer. He went off and wrote a programming language that ran on micro computers. We can say, well, well, of course that's no big deal, but at the time it was pretty big deal. He invented this language. Then to show that the language was useful, he wrote CPM. That's what really actually happened. He created this operating system and built it around this Intel microprocessor to show what could be done with microprocessors. In 1975, when he was doing this, that was pretty revolutionary. Gary's approach to computing was far ahead of the conventional notions of the time. While it consulted Intel in the 70s, he offered to sell them CPM, but Intel could see no use for it and turned them down. Shortly afterwards in 1976, Gary and his wife Dorothy founded a company called Intergalactic Digital Research, later shortened to digital research in an old Victorian home. In the early days, digital research incorporated or DRI was CPM, while the operating system is just a dim memory in most PC users' minds today, its role in the development of the micro computer was pivotal. What's so important about the work that Gary did was the fact that he was one of the first to introduce an operating system for personal computers that began laying the groundwork that basically all other personal computer operating systems, hardware design and applications can take their roots from. The main thing that CPM brought that was different from how anybody else was approaching micro computers was that Gary made a logical separation of the physical Iosystem from what was called the BDoS. The physical Iosystem was called the BIOS, the basic Iosystem, and that was a term that Gary used in early CPM. The BDoS was a basic disk operating system. The BDoS was independent of the specific hardware that you had in your micro computer. By comparison, we were looking at the time of Unix being out as a major mini computer operating system, and you could not move executables of any application programs from one Unix machine unless it was an identical machine to another system. So this was really a remarkable innovation. CPM sold extremely well and DRI flourished. The company expanded to larger quarters across the street. The number of employees grew from 9 to 24. When a new Vax mini computer arrived, it was too large to fit inside the building so the entire structure was lifted off its foundation to accommodate the machine. A beaming Gary told the staff they would all be getting a raise that week. It was a time of skyrocketing growth. By August of 1982, the company newsletter reported the DRI's revenues had grown over 1000 percent in the past two years. DRI now had 200 employees. CPM was established as the industry standard and the most popular 8-bit operating system in the world. When the computer industry was just starting up, there was the computer industry. There was IBM and the Seven Dwarves and the mainframe industry dominated by glass houses and and and giant mainframe computers across millions and millions of dollars. And the personal computer industry did not descend genealogically from that gene pool. It sprung up in a completely separate way in a completely separate place and Gary was its spiritual leader. His company was the biggest and most successful of all of the companies and all of the companies were modeled after Gary's. Gary was a very busy guy. He was chairman of a large company. He was personally involved in new product development. Yet every two weeks he would spend four hours driving up and down this Pacific coast highway to spend a day in front of the cameras when we come back Gary's new role as a television host. With DRI's business growing, Gary went on to other pursuits, including the role of co-hosts on computer chronicles. His second career as television host lasted over six years, which he provided a cute insight into technology and potential of hundreds of products. While appearing on the program, he also showed off products and technologies of his own that were far ahead of the market, including a multi-tasking operating system for PCs called concurrent dust. What's even more interesting is that all is not quite as it appears because in fact if you press a little key here, you actually see that there are lots and lots of processes actually running, lots of tasks running here. In fact on these serial terminals, even themselves, I can hit a key on this one, for example, and find that I'm running DB3 at the same time. What we're seeing here is the ability of the IBM PS2 model 80 as a 386-based machine in conjunction with concurrent dust 386. It's ability to run both standard dust applications because the operating system is completely dust compatible, but to be able to run multiple dust applications and to allow shared access to them. DRI also had one of the first graphical user interfaces called Jam. Open up a pre-prepared graph and we'll see what the combination of text and graphics look like. I'm going to go to a full-scale full screen here you can see here's the final result of putting it together text with graphics and I'll just go ahead and send this to the output device. In this case, we're going to just use a screen, but it could be a slide maker or over a transparency maker, whatever happens to be in that. Well, I think that his interest was in, first of all, showing that digital research was still the leader and not in that we had since graphical environments were sort of becoming hot, if you will. The Lisa hadn't really been successful, but word on the street was Macintosh is coming. The fact that he could go and show a multitasking graphical oriented environment, running as a digital research project that no one knew at all that we were even working on, I think he appreciated the kind of surprised factor of that. I remember him coming back and saying that Bill Gates and other people were at this conference that Esther Dyson had and they were like, eyes are like glued to the screen trying to see what that was going on. So I think we put some fear in Microsoft and I think you're a like that.