The know-it-alls
Chronicles the rise of Silicon Valley as a political and intellectual force in American life and its libertarian vision of a hypercompetitive society without the protection of unions, government regulations, or social welfare programs.
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- I have not heard about that one. Here is some dirt about the origins of Micro-Soft BASIC from Noam Cohen's The Know-It Alls, which seems fairly well researched:
> The timing of Gates's leave [from Harvard] could appear suspect since it came on the heels of a disciplinary hearing with college administrators. An auditor from the Defense Department discovered how much time Gates had spent programming on the PDP-10 computer, which was provided by the U.S. government, and began to ask questions. Gates's explanations were flimsy: first, he was doing work for his own company, and, second, some of that outside work was carried out by Allen, who wasn't a student. The records of the Gates disciplinary hearing are sealed, but accounts say that the punishment fell short of his being asked to leave… Gates, who as nineteen years old at the time, made his case in the club's newsletter, which published his "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in the January-February 1976 issue… Furthermore, there was the computer time, whose "value" exceeded $40,000, Gates informed the hobbyists. This odd phrasing jumped out to some readers, even before people learned of Gates's reliance on Harvard's computers. Gates wasn't claiming that Micro-Soft had spent $40,000 for the computer time, which it needed to recoup; rather, it had obtained that time somehow. Young Gates certainly had chutzpah. He was writing to a bunch of excited young computer enthusiasts to object to the "theft" of a version of a program [BASIC] that was, to start, based on software created by academic researchers working on a federal grant and was created using "borrowed" time on a university computer that was also paid for by the federal government.
p. 73
- It was a PDP-10 at Harvard, and it was not just Gates, it was Gates and Paul Allen working on it together. Another interesting thing is that the PDP-10 was being paid for by Department of Defense grants, and when an auditor discovered how much computer time Gates and Allen (who was not even affiliated with Harvard) had used up, there was a disciplinary hearing, after which Gates left Harvard.[1] In his "Open Letter to Hobbyists"[2] Gates claims they used $40,000 worth of computer time. So basically Microsoft started with $40,000 stolen from the government.
[1] This is documented by Noam Cohen in The Know-It Alls. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
