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When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the 'Thieves' Who Stole His First Code

posted by hubie on Wednesday February 04, @09:16AM   
from the Road-Ahead dept.

oaklandwatch writes:

As the world's first home computers appeared in 1975, Bill Gates -- then 20 years old -- screamed that "Most of you steal your software..." (Gates had coded the operating system for Altair's first home computer with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff -- only to see it pirated by Steve Wozniak's friends at the Homebrew Computing Club.) Expecting royalties, a none-too-happy Gates issued his letter in the club's newsletter (as well as Altair's own publication), complaining "I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up."

Freedom-loving coders had other ideas. When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released their Apple 1 home computer that summer, they stressed that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost..." And the earliest open-source hackers began writing their own free Tiny Basic interpreters to create a free alternative to the Gates/Micro-Soft code. (This led to the first occurrence of the phrase "Copyleft" in October of 1976.)

Open Source definition author Bruce Perens shares his thoughts today. "When I left Pixar in 2000, I stopped in Steve Job's office — which for some reason was right across the hall from mine... " Perens remembered. "I asked Steve: 'You still don't believe in this Linux stuff, do you...?'" And Perens remembers how 30 years later, that movement finally won over Steve Jobs.

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Original Submission

• I think I can take him.I think I can take him. (Score: 3, Touché) by looorg on Wednesday February 04, @10:51AM (3 children)

  by looorg (578) on Wednesday February 04, @10:51AM (#1432501)

  I have seen pictures of 20 year old Gates. I'm fairly sure I could fight him and win. Even today. Unless he uses all his Microsoft billions to have his henchmen deal with me.

  That said sure I can understand him. But still $500 for the BASIC. I wasn't aware that was the price. Seems to be somewhat over the top. That is more then the kit for the entire machine cost, and you had to put that together yourself.

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+1
  Touché=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Touché' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		3

• Re:I think I can take him.(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @11:01AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @11:01AM (#1432502)

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC [wikipedia.org]

  The Apple II was unveiled to the public at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977 and became available for sale in June. One of the most common customer complaints about the computer was BASIC's lack of floating-point math.[2] Making things more problematic was that the rival Commodore PET personal computer had a floating point-capable BASIC interpreter from the beginning. As Wozniak—the only person who understood Integer BASIC well enough to add floating point features—was busy with the Disk II drive and controller and with Apple DOS, Apple turned to Microsoft.

  Apple reportedly obtained an eight-year license for Applesoft BASIC from Microsoft for a flat fee of $31,000, renewing it in 1985 through an arrangement that gave Microsoft the rights and source code for Apple's Macintosh version of BASIC.

  Parent

• No honor among thievesNo honor among thieves (Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @11:33AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @11:33AM (#1432505)

  > But still $500 for the BASIC.

  The irony was that Bill had gotten his BASIC source code by dumpster diving and then developed it into a product using stolen time from university computers. That was back when you paid for computer usage by the hour or fraction thereof.

  Parent

  • Re:No honor among thieves(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bentonite on Thursday February 05, @03:45AM

    by Bentonite (56146) on Thursday February 05, @03:45AM (#1432598)

    If there are cycles free, you cannot steal timesharing time with a trivial load (i.e. an editor session) - as unloaded with a cycles, a timesharing computer would just be sitting there wasting cycles.

    There was an agreement that the students at the university were welcome to use idle computer time in exchange for doing something useful - of course non-student billy boy and his co-developer broke that agreement by developing proprietary software - leading to the university to remove them when they found out (the university likely wouldn't have minded if some non-students developed some free software and shared it with the students at the university).

    While it wasn't theft to utilize such idle resources, it was clearly an immoral act to use the resources to develop proprietary software.

    That was back when you paid for computer usage by the hour or fraction thereof.

    You could construct your own computer from a kit (there were of course more limitations than big commercial machines) and not pay by the hour, but at that time, for a several dozen hours of work, it was cheaper to hire computer time by the hour.

    Billy only ended of paying for a few hours of computer time at a commercial time-sharing service to finalize the software (the total cost was clearly less than $500).

    Billy of course in his "letter to hobbyists", complained that hobbyists made his business successful by widely copying the software, without paying him $500 for working for him (computer manufacturers looked for the most popular BASIC and found that MS-BASIC was most popular and therefore licensed hundreds to thousands of copies).

    The letter of course claimed the computer time was "$40,000", which is completely ludicrous.

    Parent