Digital Research

Digital Research, Inc. (aka DR or DRI; originally Intergalactic Digital Research) was the company created by Dr. Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related products. It was the first large software company in the microcomputer world. Digital Research should not be confused with Digital Equipment Corporation; the two were not affiliated. It was based in Pacific Grove, California.

Related Topics:
Gary Kildall - CP/M - Operating system - Microcomputer - Digital Equipment Corporation - Pacific Grove, California

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The company's operating systems, starting with CP/M for 8080/Z80-based microcomputers, were the de facto standard of their era, as MS-DOS and MS Windows became later. Digital Research was purchased by Novell in 1991, primarily for Novell to gain access to the OS line. DR's product suite included the original CP/M and its various offshoots; DR-DOS which was a MS-DOS compatible version of CP/M, and MP/M, the multi-user CP/M.

Related Topics:
8080 - Z80 - De facto - MS-DOS - MS Windows - Novell - 1991 - DR-DOS - MP/M

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DR produced a selection of programming language compilers and interpreters for their OS-supported platforms, including C, Pascal, COBOL, Forth, PL/I, and BASIC. They also produced a microcomputer version of the GKS graphics standard (related to NAPLPS) called GSX, and later used this as the basis of their GEM GUI. Less known are their application programs, limited largely to the GSX-based DR-DRAW and a small suite of GUI programs for GEM.

Related Topics:
Programming language - Compiler - Interpreter - C - Pascal - COBOL - Forth - PL/I - BASIC - GKS - NAPLPS - GEM - GUI

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Digital Research made the Multiuser DOS utility, which allowed multiple users to run DOS programs concurrently on the same computer.

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For a time after December 1974, the date of first use of CP/M, Control Program/Monitor was what CP/M stood for. This ended some time prior to 15 November 1976, the date of first use of the mark CP/M in commerce. By the time that CP/M was a mark in commercial use, CP/M stood for Control Program for Microcomputers. These dates are recorded in trademark registration number 1112646 at the United States Patent Office as filed by Intergalactic Digital Research, Inc. doing business as Digital Research Corporation on 25 November 1977 by an attorney acting on behalf of Gary Kildall himself. This renaming of CP/M was part of a larger effort by Kildall and his business-partner wife to convert Kildall's personal project of CP/M and the Intel-contracted PL/M compiler into an ever-more-serious commercial enterprise, where "micro", as in microcomputer, was a consistent branding, including not only Control Program for Microcomputers and Programming Language for Microcomputers but also a few years later Digital Research's Microport Unix that competed against Microsoft's Xenix. The Kildalls astutely intended to establish the Digital Research brand and its product lines as synonymous with "microcomputer" in the consumer's mind, similar to what IBM and Microsoft together later successfully accomplished in making "personal computer" synonymous with IBM and Microsoft product offerings. As further evidence that this was part of a larger effort of keeping the CP/M and Digital Research Corporation brands stable in the public's mind while evolving the underlying business behind the scenes, the Kildalls effectively publicly renamed Intergalactic Digital Research, Inc. for use in commercial activities, via only a doing-business-as filing, to Digital Research Corporation. Intergalactic Digital Research, Inc. was later renamed via a corporation change-of-name filing to Digital Research, Inc., which itself continued to do business publicly as Digital Research Corporation for a time into the 1980s, after which Digital Research, Inc. did business under its own name.

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