Kathryn Betty Strutynski

79 - Kathryn Betty Strutynski, a long-time resident of Carmel, passed away on April 9, 2010, at the home of her daughter, Karen. Born in Nephi, Utah, she attended Brigham Young University where she obtained an undergraduate degree in mathematics. In her early 20's, Kathryn moved to San Francisco, where she went to work for Pan Am Airways. Here, she was responsible for all charter bids at the Western Division of Pan Am. When Pan Am consolidated its offices in New York, Kathryn was the only female employee offered moving expenses to relocate - how times have changed! However, Kathryn decided to stay in her beloved San Francisco. Kathryn then went to work at the estimating department of Bechtel Corporation in San Francisco. Bechtel sent her to every class given at IBM when the company decided to purchase a mainframe. With her new knowledge, Kathryn ended up building the company's fist database retrieval system. Bechtel kept her database system for ten years. In 1958, Kathryn married an Austrian, Alfred Strutynski, and they moved to Carmel. While living on the Peninsula, Kathryn worked for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and obtained her master's degree in computer programming through the school. At NPS, Kathryn was given system responsibility for the VM operating system. Because of this, a Navy professor by the name of Gary Kildall, who was very interested in all operating systems, developed a deepfriendship with Kathryn. The two of them made unauthorized changes to the IBM VM-360 and 370 system code. IBM never let them see the code again. A few years later, Kathryn left NPS, when in her words, "Gary walked into my office, picked up my briefcase, and said, �I can afford you.'" She then became the fourth employee of Gary's company, Digital Research Inc. At DRI, Kathryn watched excitedly as Gary completed work on the first computer operating system known as CP/M or Control Program for Microcomputers. The foundations of this operating system were later to become the basis for both QDOS and MS/DOS. The computer company, IBM, was very excited by the possibilities of this new operating system and tried to bargain with DRI to sell it this new product. When Gary became hesitant to sell CP/M to IBM, it was Kathryn who was called late one evening at home by Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp. and asked to intercede with Gary. However, the sale was not to be, and the rest, as they say, is history. Kathryn stayed on at DRI and continued to write code for new versions of CP/M. She worked on CP/M 2.0 and CP/M +. She made many contributions to CP/M 2.2 (the largest money spinner for DRI) including a background spooler for printing (simple multi-tasking) and system guides. In fact, in one book, Kathryn is called "the mother of CP/M 2.2," for the hundreds and hundreds of hours she put in with Dave Brown, John Pierce, Bob Silberstien, and others, perfecting Kildall's original design. Kathryn was also the project manager for CP/M-86 and Concurrent CP/M-86. While at DRI, Kathryn gave seminars on hardware implementation in Brussels, Wokingham, England, and Munich, Germany. One of Kathryn's biggest thrills in later life was meeting the author Sir Harold Evans while he was re-writing parts of his book, "They Made America," for the release of its paperback version. Kathryn spent many long hours working with Sir Harold Evans updating the chapter of his book relating to the birth of CP/M and her beloved Gary Kildall's contributions to the field of computing. Kathryn will be lovingly remembered by her daughter, Karen (Chris Altmeyer) Strutynski, and her grandchildren, Louisa Strutynski and Katarina and Rhiannon Altmeyer. Funeral services will take place at on Sunday, June 27 at 1:00 p.m. at the Nautilus Room of the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove. To sign Kathyrn's guest book and leave messages for her family, please visit www.thepaulmortuary.com