Gary Kildall

Gary Arlen Kildall (May 19, 1942 to July 11, 1994) was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur who was born in Seattle, Washington. During the 1970s he created the operating system CP/M, among other operating systems and programming tools, and then founded Digital Research, Inc. to market and sell his software products. He is considered a pioneer of the personal computer revolution. In 1974 in Pacific Grove, California, he demonstrated the first working prototype of CP/M, which later became the dominant operating system for microcomputers for a time, and his invention of the BIOS let a microprocessor-based computer communicate with disk storage.