Bill Gates' open letter to hobbyists: 50 years of software piracy

50 years ago, the then twenty-year-old Bill Gates typed an “Open Letter to Hobbyists” on a typewriter. In it, he vented his anger that only a few, less than 10 percent, of hobbyists bought the 4K BASIC developed by his proto-company Micro-Soft when they ordered a kit of the Altair 8800 for $397 from the company MITS. Without the software, the computer was useless. In his letter, Gates claimed that Micro-Soft had developed five different BASIC versions. “The value of the computer time we have spent exceeds $40,000.” Altair owners who copied the 4K BASIC, stolen at a club meeting, among themselves were acting illegally.

A letter makes waves

Gates wrote: “Hobbyists should be aware that the majority of them are stealing their software.” At the end of the open letter, he called for drastic measures against those who resell the BASIC: “They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name. They should be excluded from every computer club meeting they attend.” The letter was copied by MITS employee Dave Bunnell and sent to several trade journals and daily newspapers. Micro-Soft and Bill Gates suddenly became known and were at the “center of an ideological debate,” as he later wrote in his memoirs.

The open letter to hobbyists had two precursors, which Gates describes in “Source Code: My Beginnings.” At a demonstration of the Altair computer in a Hyatt hotel, someone fished out a backup copy of the not-yet-finished 4K BASIC from a box, which was only noticed a few months later. “In the end, it (the paper tape) found its way to a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, who made seventy more tapes with the software, distributed them at a meeting of his club, and encouraged everyone to make more copies.” Hundreds of copies circulated before Micro-Soft had finished the version that was to be sold with the Altair 8800.

But where was the BASIC version developed, where was the computer time worth $40,000 mentioned by Gates consumed? Bill Gates and Paul Allen used an emulator of the Intel 8080 processor, which ran on a DEC PDP-10 at Harvard University. This eventually came to light, and so the Harvard-enrolled student Gates was summoned for a formal investigation by the head of the computer lab, who wanted to document the incident with a witness. In the memoirs, it reads, “Witness? Am I in legal jeopardy? I wondered then. I told him I would reimburse the center for the time I had used the computer. I also mentioned that I wanted to make the BASIC version I had written at Harvard available to everyone so that anyone could use it.”

Dad fixed it

It was ultimately thanks to the intervention of Gates' father that the investigation fizzled out. The lawyer demanded that the university administration release the written rules for computer use, including the different rules that applied to professors and students, respectively. They did not exist.

In his memoirs, Bill Gates downplays the matter: “Our use of the computer had not bothered anyone; the computer would have been unused if we hadn't used it. We were also not hired by MITS to develop the software. It was a custom job, a bet that the company would buy it if we could write it.” In the Computer Notes, published months later by Dave Bunnell as the Altair Club newsletter, a second open letter from Gates was printed in which he was more conciliatory.

(dahe)