BASIC

This portrayal has helped to set up what is often remembered as the first major clash between free software and the corporate force of Microsoft: the "Open Letter to Hobbyists." Bill Gates wrote this confrontational letter in February 1976, declaring: "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software." It ran in the ''Altair Users' Newsletter'' as well as the newsletter of the Homebrew Computer Club. The letter spurred hundreds of responses, public and personal, causing the major early controversey in home computing. Many see it as the beginning of Microsoft's career of unfair dealing and of embracing and extending, a practice where the company takes existing tools and ideas and creates their own version for competitive advantage. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson wrote in 2001, during the antitrust case against the company, that "Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect." He was hardly the only one with this view at that point. Did Microsoft's turn to the dark side begin with this letter to hobbyists?

This portrayal has helped to set up what is often remembered as the first major clash between free software and the corporate force of Microsoft: the "Open Letter to Hobbyists." Bill Gates wrote this confrontational letter in February 1976, declaring: "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software." It ran in the ''Altair Users' Newsletter'' as well as the newsletter of the Homebrew Computer Club. The letter spurred hundreds of responses, public and personal, causing the major early controversey in home computing. Many see it as the beginning of Microsoft's career of unfair dealing and of embracing and extending, a practice where the company takes existing tools and ideas and creates their own version for competitive advantage. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson wrote in 2001, during the antitrust case against the company, that "Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect." He was hardly the only one with this view at that point. Did Microsoft's turn to the dark side begin with this letter to hobbyists?

For one thing, neither Microsoft, nor Gates, nor Allen was the party fingered in Levy's book as the "foe." That moniker is attached to Ed Roberts, the head of MITS, who was running a business with dozens of employees, many of whom would be around furiously working at any given hour to fulfill computer hobbyist's orders (and their dreams of computer ownership). At the beginning of 1976, "Micro-Soft" (the spelling had not been regularized by the time of the first letter) was simply two partners, both recent college drop-outs, one a teenager and other only slightly older. The company had paid other people, such as BASIC contributor Davidoff, but would not gets its first official employee until April 1976.

For one thing, neither Microsoft, nor Gates, nor Allen was the party fingered in Levy's book as the "foe." That moniker is attached to Ed Roberts, the head of MITS, who was running a business with dozens of employees, many of whom would be around furiously working at any given hour to fulfill computer hobbyist's orders (and their dreams of computer ownership). At the beginning of 1976, "Micro-Soft" (the spelling had not been regularized by the time of the first letter) was simply two partners, both recent college drop-outs, one a teenager and other only slightly older. The company had paid other people, such as BASIC contributor Davidoff, but would not gets its first official employee until April 1976.