Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 19 submissions in the queue.

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.

Original Submission

 
This discussion was created by hubie (1068) for logged-in users only. Log in and try again!
When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the 'Thieves' Who Stole His First Code | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 27 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by RTJunkie on Wednesday February 04, @02:55PM (2 children)

    by RTJunkie (6647) on Wednesday February 04, @02:55PM (#1432519)

    Old timer here. The Altair 8800 did not originally have an operating system, but Gates and Allen developed a version of BASIC to run on it. Apparently, the availability of that language had a big impact on the success of these machines.
    IMSAI developed a clone of the 8800 and adopted CP/M as its OS. Later Microsoft developed MS-DOS which was, apparently, heavily influenced by CP/M.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Informative=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Wednesday February 04, @03:04PM (1 child)

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 04, @03:04PM (#1432521) Journal

    Microsoft bought in MS-DOS from another company, which had written it to be effectively a clone of CP/M for the 8086 architecture. It was cheap and nasty.

    • (Score: 4, Touché) by Freeman on Wednesday February 04, @04:07PM

      by Freeman (732) on Wednesday February 04, @04:07PM (#1432528) Journal

      It was cheap and nasty.

      Just like Fast Food. People love it.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"