This is a great interview if you ever watched the movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley” regarding the start of Microsoft. This is the story of the guys that lost the deal to Bill.

You’ve heard the stories about how Microsoft and Bill Gates got the operating system business with IBM and how Gary Kildall and Digital Research lost the deal.

But I’ve always wondered about why Gary was out flying that day.

So when I got a chance to sit down with Gary Kildall’s best friend and FLYING PARTNER that day I jumped at the chance. That’s Tom Rolander who held a key role inside Digital Research (the folks who made CPM which, back before the IBM PC, was one of the most popular personal computer OS of the day — my dad had a CPM card for our Apple IIs so we could run software designed for it).

Read it all here…

NOTE: The first 12 minutes or so are pretty boring background, so skip that if you want…