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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   Printer-friendly
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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  • (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.

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