BASIC

In his book ''Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,'' Steven Levy describes the early history of home computing and the development of BASICs for the Altair and its immediate successors as a confrontation between an ethic of openness and the sort of corporate powers that were "a foe of the Hacker Ethic." (p. 227)

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?

There are a few complications to the most popular version of this early clash, and too simplistic assignment of good and evil roles, just as there are complications in considering Altair BASIC as completely bad and TinyBASIC as pure and just.

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.

Copyright protection for computer programs, which Gates based his argument upon, was well-established by 1976. While sharing of programs certainly happened in users' groups and other contexts, today's concept of free software had not been articulated by that time. Richard Stallman started the GNU project in 1983 and published the GNU Manifesto and founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, a decade after Altair BASIC. An argument has been made that, even though this discourse has been overlooked, some of the ideas important to the free software movement were first publicly stated in the columns of magazines and newsletters in response to Gates's letter. (Driscoll) But many hobbyists were not interested in free (as in freedom) software as it is conceptualized today; rather, they were interested in (as the editorial in the first issue of ''Dr. Dobbs'' explained) "free and very inexpensive" software.

Gates wrote a "Second and Final Letter," replying to several objections raised to his first letter. In it, he went on to admit that, at least for certain types of programs, the free sharing of code was likely to become the norm. He even suggested that good "compilers and interpreters" (such as Microsoft's Altair BASIC) would enable such shared software:

Gates certainly had a concept of software that would allow for it to be sold and tightly controlled by a corporation, but he was hardly seeking to eliminate hobbyist programming and the sharing of code. The company's principles did oppose the ethic of the Homebrew Computer Club and the People's Computer Company in significant ways, but Microsoft also did end up facilitating new software creation with BASIC and also facilitating the exchange of programs that Gates mentioned. Through licensing deals with computer companies, they did a great deal to bring BASIC not only out of the minicomputer time-sharing environment and onto microcomputers but also beyond the hard core of code-sharing enthusiast programmers.

Another sign that Microsoft was not completely at odds with the PCC is found in Appendix M to the Altair BASIC manual. On this list of "a few of the many texts that may be helpful in learning BASIC," all but one of the books can be ordered from the PCC, whose address is listed. Five of the six books are about BASIC specifically, but the manual also lists the radical and countercultural ''Computer Lib / Dream Machines'' by Theodore H. Nelson. In 1987, an edition of this book would be published by Microsoft Press.

Ultimately, BASIC became what it was in 1982 thanks to the institution of higher education where it was first developed, the corporation that implemented it and licensed it for use on home computers (including the Commodore 64), and, significantly, the hacker ethic of code sharing that allowed BASIC programs to circulate freely.