https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVqBokd3l2E
I hadn't heard of this guy, but I should have. I mean aside from his co-hosting the show with Stewart Cheifet.
He was one of the first guys with a portable computer when the era of the desktop PC hadn't even begun.
He invented CP/M, the first commercially successful CLI OS for personal computers which, needless to say, was pretty revolutionary in the early to mid 1970s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M
Apparently the idea of an OS that could run on many different CPUs/systems was extremely forward thinking, in so much as the executables were portable between systems (hardware agnostic, only relying on the OS). At the time, this was not possible on Unix systems.
He actually wrote CP/M to showcase the high level programming language (running on the Intel 8080 in 1975) that he developed, called PL/M.
There is a huge IBM/Microsoft/Gates scandal with regard to copyright infringement claims (against MS).
Fun fact: CP/M would also run on the Zilog Z80, which was compatible with the Intel 8080 machine code. The interesting part is the Zilog Z80 was the CPU of a device we're pretty familiar with: TI-81, TI-82, TI-83, TI-85 and TI-86 series. Back in my days of TI graphic calculator hacking, I don't recall anything using CP/M, as I think folks elected to write their own OS in assembly.