A few weeks ago Mrinal Desai wrote me on Facebook and said I had to meet his new boss.

I had no idea who Mrinal was, nor did I know anything about his boss or the new company he was pitching to me. Crossloop.

But, that little conversation led me to a phone conversation where he gave me a little taste of what was to come and got me more interested. His boss worked at Digital Research back in the early 1980s with Gary Kildall. My ears instantly perked up.

Don’t know who Gary Kildall is? You should. He’s the one that Bill Gates beat.

So, today I took Buzz and my son down to Pacific Grove to meet Mrinal and his boss.

And it just got more and more interesting.

His boss is Tom Rolander.

He was flying with Gary Kildall the day that IBM came knocking and asking to license Digital Research’s CPM.

You know the rest of the story. Digital Research lost to Microsoft and its DOS, which came from Tim Paterson who worked at a Seattle Computer Store.

But I had never before heard the story straight from the guy who was flying with Gary. I’ll get the video up this week. It’s an incredible piece of computing history.

The house above? That’s the house that IBM came and tried to get a deal with Digital Research and that’s Tom today.

Make sure to subscribe to ScobleShow. You won’t want to miss this one.

And that’s not the only incredible interview we have coming up on ScobleShow this week — also coming are interviews with IBM’s top intellectual property lawyer and a visit to Stanford University’s computer science department where we meet one of the smart people shaping the future there. I love how during the interview we nonchalantly learn that Google was started “across the hall.”

I love my job and thanks to Seagate for funding all of this (Tom even tells a story about Seagate’s founder, Al Shugart, inventor of the hard drive). I pinch myself every morning that I get to hang around such incredible people.

I wonder who’ll be next to introduce themselves in Facebook?