# 2026-04-02 - Computer Connections by Gary Kildall
This memoir could be inspirational for someone who is enthusiastic
about programming and retro-computing. I loved Gary Kildall's
humorous, conversational writing style and his detailed descriptions
of what it was like to use technology before it became
retro-technology. My only regret is that it was not completed.
I read that his family wanted to omit parts because they felt that
Gary Kildall's alcoholism, in the writing, did not reflect his
authentic self. I read people debating this on Slashdot and to me
they came across as callous. I tend to agree with his family. My
reasoning goes like this:
People are prescribed psych meds because "who they are" without meds
is not acceptable. On the meds, their behavior and personality are
slightly altered, and more acceptable.
People who are addicted to alcohol are self-medicating. Due to
trauma, the absence of positive outlets, or whatever the reasons,
they cannot deal with sobriety and they drink.
So in my estimation, the person who is altered by a substance is a
different person than the one who is sober. It is valid to have
opinions about which is the more authentic. The opinions of family
count more than the opinions of strangers, and the opinions of the
person in question count the most of all.
So only Gary Kildall could answer who he most authentically was,
and his family certainly knows better than i do.
The memoir is short, so i will try to keep my quotes short.
I quote two veins of thought:
* The continuity from the Kildall Nautical School to the author
taking an interest in computers.
* The staggering cost, in terms of human life, taken by computers.
In retro-technology, an example was the hours spent waiting for
operators to process punch cards. In modern technology, the costs
are represented in other ways, always externalized, normalized, and
kept as "invisible" as possible while in plain sight.
# Chapter 1: One Person's Need For A Personal Computer
To navigate you take "sights." A sight is a reference point to a
celestial body, such as a star. You look through a sextant, find the
proper angle, and then look at your chronometer. Next, look in the
Nautical Almanac for that exact time and date. Use standard, but
tedious, calculation forms to plot the result. That tells you where
you are on the face of the earth.
[In the early 1960's, Gary's father] Joe often described a "machine"
that he wanted to build. "You punch-in the navigation data and turn
the crank, and out comes the position of your ship."
* * *
The Kildall Nautical School taught me processes that high school
hadn't. Such as the ability to do mathematics of a sort and, most
important, the mental tools to dissect and solve complicated
problems, and to work from the beginning to the end in an organized
fashion.
# Chapter 2: Seattle and the University of Washington
In 1963, at the "U-Dub," as it was called, I found myself in the
evolutionary transition between mechanical calculation and digital
computers. My first class in Numerical Analysis in 1964 was from a
professor in his eighties. This nice old gentleman was retiring, and
not too soon in my opinion, as he seemed quite feeble and at somewhat
of a loss of memory. He taught the trade of computing with Marchant
calculators. A Marchant calculator [1] is a big, black machine, about
three times the size of a typewriter. It has a giant carriage on top
with about ten holes with little mechanical numbers that pop up in
the slots. There are buttons all over the front with digits, decimal
points, and keyed symbols that multiply and divide to control this
mechanical nightmare.
They used these Marchant calculators for Numerical Analysis, starting
in about the 1940's. A business would hire rows and rows of Marchant
calculator operators to compute so-called "Finite Differences."
You sat there and pushed those keys while the mechnicals made a host
of noises by cranking and grinding who-knows-what, until the rattling
stopped. You got a number. You put the number on a form, and
eventually, with enough numbers and forms, you got a result.
Sometimes the resulting number was correct. These operators also made
tables to figure where the Sun, Moon, stars and planets would be at a
particular time, much like the tables that solved the navigation
problems that we talked about earlier. In a sense, dad's navigation
"crank" was somewhat inconveniently embodied in the Marchant with a
"form" alongside.
* * *
[Describing using FORTRAN in 1965:]
You walk into the keypunch room with your two-foot long cardboard box
of FORTRAN STATEMENT cards. Then wait in line to get to a keypunch
machine. Finally, someone tires of typing, and you get a seat.
Each card in that stupid cardboard box is like a single line on your
computer screen today. I don't even want to think about it, because
you young [folks] have it all too easy. ... All us oldtimers remember
that the keypunch machine is like a typewriter, but it shuffles cards
through its mechanism and stamps rectangular holes in a column below
each character. You leaf through your box, alter each necessary card,
and then relinquish your keypunch to the next anxious student. Then,
take your precious box of cards to the shelf outside the computer
room and wait and wait and wait.
The computer room hides the IBM 7094 with SAC-like security doors.
Computer operators, trained in "Grumbly 101," sit behind that door,
attending to their work and throwing down coffee without even their
own notice.
I know this because I spent about 1,312,467 hours looking through
that little peep-hole window to see if the operator would arise from
his or her throne to go to the restroom and possibly retrieve my box
of punched cards on the way back into SAC.
If you stayed around very late at night, you might get a "turnaround"
of an hour or so to get the printout. The program usually didn't
work, so it was back to the key-punch.
* * *
I also reviewed the Computer Chronicles Unix episode [2] hosted by
Gary Kildall.
author: Kildall, Gary, 1942-1994
TEXT detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Gary_Kildall
HTML source: https://computerhistory.org/blogs/computer-history-museum-license-agreement-for-the-kildall-manuscript/
tags: ebook,memoires,retrocomputing,technical
title: Computer Connections
# Footnotes
TEXT [1] Marchant calculator
DIR [2] Unix (1985), Computer Chronicles
# Tags
DIR ebook
DIR memoires
DIR retrocomputing
DIR technical