On Friday, 1972 UW CSE Ph.D. alum Gary Kildall will be honored by IEEE with a “Milestones in Electrical Engineering and Computing” plaque at the site of his company Digital Research Inc. in Pacific Grove, CA.
Kildall’s CP/M was the first microcomputer operating system, and the dominant OS throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, until Microsoft purchased QDOS (a CP/M lookalike) from UW CSE bachelors alum Tim Paterson and licensed it to IBM as MS-DOS.
Seattle Times article here. UW CSE News post with multiple links to background material here.