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30th Anniversary of Gates' Letter to HCC
suso writes "30 years ago today, Bill Gates wrote the infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists about licensing of Altair BASIC to the Homebrew Computer Club. Looking back it's interesting to read this emotionally written document as it is probably Gate's first publicly written opinion about licensing software." From the letter: "The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft. What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at."
Since there was no incentive for Micro-Soft to write good software, they haven't since that time.
ed
That's a joke, son.
One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written.
Well it looks like Gates was right when it comes to MS software. Damn those hobbyists....
I agree with Bill Gates where he writes:
Hardware must be paid for, but soft-ware is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
...where you would "activate" your software license by locally printing out a punch tape which you mail to him and receive a response punch tape with your BASIC interpreter key. It didn't go over because toggling some front panel switches caused you to have to reactivate and mail a new punch tape to Gates.
So... now that he has his 10 programmers, is he going to write really good software???
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
Because successfull thiefs have a tendency to become nobles.. worked in the middleages.. works now.
As comprehensive, eloquent, well-researched, logical, meticulously detailed responses go, this one is a doozie.
Bill Gates was not a thief; he just understood that PDP-10 time is a fundamental right. He was just trying out the PDP-10 to see if he wanted to buy one.
What Bill is basically saying is if the HCC pirate their software Microsoft will go out of business! Damn you HCC look what happened because you didn't steal enough of Bill's code! Windows 2, Windows 3, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP: ALL YOUR FAULT!
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.