Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Open Source Microsoft

When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the World's First Software Pirates (thenewstack.io) 83

Posted by EditorDavid from the pirates-of-Silicon-Valley dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Just months after his 20th birthday, Bill Gates had already angered the programmer community," remembers this 50th-anniversary commemoration of Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists. "As the first home computers began appearing in the 1970s, the world faced a question: Would its software be free?"

Gates railed in 1976 that "Most of you steal your software." Gates had coded the BASIC interpreter 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."

But 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 early 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 that movement finally won over Steve Jobs and carried the day. "Three years later, Steve stood onstage in front of a slide that said 'Open Source: We Think It's Great!' as he introduced the Safari browser, which at that time was based on the browser engine developed by the KDE Open Source project!"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the World's First Software Pirates More

When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the World's First Software Pirates

Comments Filter:

  • Operating System (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jerrry ( 43027 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @03:32PM (#65962820)

    Gates and Allen didn't code an operating system for the Altair They coded a BASIC interpreter.

  • That Altair BASIC ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @03:42PM (#65962838)

    ... looks an awful lot like the BASIC I (and Bill) got my start on with a DEC PDP.

  • Microsoft basic was stolen code fished out of school trash cans.

    Are we seeing this nonsense because he's in the Epstein files? I imagine his PR firm is working overtime right now.

  • Gates PR team is working overtime! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by atomicalgebra ( 4566883 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @04:00PM (#65962866)
    Anything to distance himself from the Epstein allegations. They aren't going anywhere by the way. No wonder his wife divorced him.

    • Bill cheated on his wife with somebody at work. He also was probably difficult to live with and she just waited until the last child to grow up to divorce.

      I did not like if not hated Gates since the 80s. I don't think he did anything with Epstein. Being super rich and not trustworthy before even meeting Epstein, he'd not strike me as a fool who gets played by con men; especially, after years of people trying to get to his money.

      It's not like there are not top-notch hookers around the world with legal servic

      • > Gates is just too smart for that.

        Dont turn your brain off because you reached your moral threshold. Maybe he was involved because it wasnt about just sex. Gates and the Clintons have alwas been an immoral bunch. With enough wealth, it festered.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        His interactions with Epstein revolved around trying to rustle up more donations to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

        • You forget that Melinda herself divorced Bill citing his relationship with Epstein. That's more than securing donations. Why would Epstein lie in a note to himself about Bill?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            Don't remember him even being mentioned, it seemed mostly like she was tired of dealing with his relationship with his personal assistant.

  • Finish the story (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zero__Kelvin ( 151819 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @04:01PM (#65962868) Homepage
    You forgot to add "then Gates went on to commit anti-trust crimes, lie to the general public claiming anyone can use a computer, and ultimately spawned the company that would set computing back decades and cause irreparable harm that continues to this day and will likely do so in perpetuity."

    • Looking back at it all, I wish the pirates had won

      I don't know about his Epstein involvement, but his jihad on reducing world populations and getting third world governments to accept "vaccinations" that essentially sterilized large numbers of people has been a blight on humanity. If one thinks the world is over-populated, the solution lies in killing off retirees faster, not preventing more people from being born

    • And above all, let's START the story. Because it was Bill Gates who was proud that MS-DOS was the most copied OS in the world, even though there was PC-DOS. Only later he reframed his free marketing as "piracy".

      • And above all, let's START the story. Because it was Bill Gates who was proud that MS-DOS was the most copied OS in the world, even though there was PC-DOS. Only later he reframed his free marketing as "piracy".

        PC DOS was just rebranded MS DOS with some added utilities. MS was paid for every copy of PC DOS IBM sold.

  • Though running that paper tape through the reader was a pain.

    • Well, that's what you get for trying to use toilet paper instead of perforated paper tape when punching your bits.

    • I never got my legitimate copy of Altair Basic to load correctly from an ASR 33 tape reader. I did load it successfully from an ASR 35, but that was too large to borrow and take home. Eventually, the clever little OAE OP-80a optical reader kit would read the tape ok.

      Not long after that, I worked on a commercial 8080 project where the executable was loaded from a large reel of paper tape, with up to 35 patch tapes loaded afterwards to obtain a runnable image.

  • Wrong assumption in the article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SteveWoz ( 152247 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @05:11PM (#65962954) Homepage

    I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

  • Some had pre-paid for Altair BASIC and it was months late. Gates didn't pay for the mainframe time used to run the emulator Altair BASIC was tested on. Technically, the code belonged to the university, but that legal term was never enforced. Several bugs were fixed before it was distributed.

    • That isn't the story the way I have heard it (e.g. as on Wikipedia). Gates and Allen used Harvard facilities to adapt an Intel 8008 emulator that Allen had written for their Traf-o-Data project. There doesn't seem to have been any kind of contract that made that work the property of Harvard even if Harvard did not intend their hardware to be used for commercial projects. They polished it on time purchased from a time-sharing service.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        Harvard, like all universities with a mainframe back then claimed rights to anything developed on their mainframe. It was part of the agreement signed on admission.

        • I was a year behind Gates at Harvard and don't remember signing any such thing. It's conceivable I've forgotten, but any evidence of this?

  • Gates is a hypocrite. Dumpster diving BASIC (Score:3)

    by ArghBlarg ( 79067 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @05:23PM (#65962970) Homepage

    ...source code for the version his local university had, their listings were often discarded in the back bins of the labs. Oh, and he wasn't enrolled in classes there so he stole computer lab time to work on his version.

    No I don't have the references handy, but they're out there.

  • Why is I remember back in the late 80's after Gates stole DOS that he was sued for not paying the programmer of DOS that Microsoft sold as MS-DOS? Rich people keep trying to change history and they suck at it while people that lived at the time can still speck up!!!
    • My understanding is that Gates bought what was then called QDOS from Seattle Computer Systems for $50K. There is much to be said about Microsoft's later business practices, but as far as I can tell, the acquisition of MS-DOS was perfectly ethical.

      • Re:Gate's Lies and donates to hide his guilt!!!! (Score:5, Informative)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Sunday February 01, 2026 @07:01PM (#65963142)

        My understanding is that Gates bought what was then called QDOS from Seattle Computer Systems for $50K. There is much to be said about Microsoft's later business practices, but as far as I can tell, the acquisition of MS-DOS was perfectly ethical.

        It was ethical. Just like Internet Explorer was acquired ethically.

        Basically Microsoft acquired (at first) QD DOS from Seattle Computer Products under a licensing scheme. Basically he'd license it and pay SCP a fee for each customer he sold it to. He sold it to 1 customer - IBM. Microsoft later acquired SCP (rather their only programmer) for around $75K or so and thus QD DOS. But basically SCP made so little money out of it they were forced to sell to Microsoft.

        And yes, one copy is correct, as IBM bought the complete rights of PC-DOS from Microsoft. (This was actually one of the two sticking points IBM had with Digital Research in trying to license CP/M - first was the NDA, second was the fact IBM wanted a free and clear license and not a per-unit royalty. The whole "Gary was out flying and IBM didn't wait" wasn't a fabrication (it was true - as Gary's wife handled all the business part while Gary was just the programmer) but more of an fabrication of what really happened - Gary's wife objected to the NDA and the all-in licensing deal and waited to wait for Gary to see if he wanted to override the decision).

        What does this have to do with Internet Explorer? Same thing happened. Microsoft licensed the web browser from Spyglass Inc., on a revenue basis - that is, Spyglass would get a cut of the revenue Microsoft made reselling their browser. Well, Microsoft instead chose to give away Internet Explorer.

        So yes, the software was obtained legally, but ethically it would be morally ambiguous.

        • Spyglass should have known better: First, Microsoft had a habit of stealing technology. Second, software contracts were already moving to a fixed fee per user/machine: It was a better measure of consumption and thus contract obligations. Third, if Microsoft liked the terms, the cynical opinion should be, they already had a way of abusing the seller.

        • It was ethical. Just like Internet Explorer was acquired ethically.

          Garbage. They knew the deal was with the expectation that the resulting product would be sold and be a revenue stream for Spy Glass. They deceived Spy Glass and were sued, MS lost in court and had to pay up. So quite clearly unethical and as judged by courts illegal.

  • that 50ish years later, the software purchasing model would be the norm to generate revenue.

  • ""our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost..."" What utter BS, that has NEVER EVER been Jobs his philosophy, HE was in it for the money and nothing else and you see that through the whole Apple history after the Apple ][, but Wozniak is a different story..

    • Our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost to ourselves and then, having provided the software to ourselves for free or at minimal cost, to then sell it to our customers for as much as we can get.

  • Let us also remember the oh so wonderful Gates of the 90s, the FUD nightmares and desperately trying to eliminate any competition, especially against linux.
    It is beyond bizarre seeing how m$ tries to act all cool nowadays, after all they have done and stood for being the worst of the worst.
    How quickly people forget. Gates was the biggest thief himself.

  • Yeah, everyone loves free software: Until their hard work is treated like a toy.

    Helping the little guy is good, until a Corporation demands more profits.

    It's why a winner-takes-all culture hurts everyone else.

  • Bill is WIse
    Bill is Good
    Trust Bill ...

  • billg was the worlds first software pirates (Score:3)

    by Mirnotoriety ( 10462951 ) on Monday February 02, 2026 @05:32AM (#65963810)
    Billg was the worlds first software pirate. As in he cloned Microsoft BASIC from the source code of a DEC BASIC-PLUS tape sourced from a DEC users group.
  • wtf are you talking about? When many internet things came out - they were overpriced BS and people that were not emprise level could not afford it. Example - networking - you used to pay for the software and hardware AND each node you wanted to connect (users) and it was like 1k - in the f'ing 80's PER user connected (BNC connectoins) We started pirating DAY 1. Back in the dos days. back when games could not stop anyone from coping the disks so you had to have decoders (code wheels and every other type o

Slashdot Top Deals

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire

Close