Just months after his 20th birthday, Bill Gates had already angered the programmer community.
As the first home computers began appearing in the 1970s, the world faced a question: Would its software be free?
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the day young Gates penned his infamous 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists,” complaining that his very first piece of commercial software had been pirated. It kicked off a series of reverberations, along with a major controversy that would continue boiling over the next half century — and ultimately shape the world we live and work in today.
‘A sea of blank canvases’
I asked Bruce Perens, who created the original Open Source definition in 1997, if he remembered Bill Gates’ letter in 1976. At the time, Perens was just 19, so “I was just out of high school and could not afford any kind of computer!”
Still, he recognizes that the historic document contains its own ironies — if not all the outlines of a struggle that was yet to come. “I think the most interesting thing about the letter… is that so many people thought at the time that you needed a company to develop something like BASIC, when it was really only written by one or two people. It would be someone’s hobby project today!”
In 1976, 20-year-old Bill Gates was “a slim blond genius who looked even younger than his tender years,” Steven Levy wrote in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
Working with 22-year-old Paul Allen (with some code from “hired” math programmer Monte Davidoff), Gates created a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800, which was destined to become the world’s first commercially successful home computer.
Ed Roberts, the head of the company, had then hired Allen (and let Gates work remotely) to write software for his microcomputer, leading Gates and Allen to decide the logical name for their software-writing enterprise would be: Micro-Soft.
Levy got the story of what happened next from a Berkeley building contractor turned Homebrew Computing Club member, Steve Dompier. After a demo in Palo Alto, “Somebody, I don’t think anyone figured out who, borrowed one of their paper tapes lying on the floor” — the tape holding the entirety of the Gates/Allen/Davidoff Altair BASIC code.
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