The following article is from today's NY Times. If nothing else, you can see 
that the hacker mentality is not new [and has its home in Silicon Valley :-), 
long before it was called Silicon Valley]. Bill Gates was infuriated by the 
theft; I remember the episode well, although I heard about it months later. 
The URL for the article is:

     http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/18/technology/18BASI.html

Included in the article is a photograph of a hand-scrawled note by Bill Gates 
to Steve Dompier, an early computer hobbyist who is accused of being the 
first software pirate. The note reads: 

"Basic starts at location 0 and starts intially with MEMORY SIZE? The 
documentation takes you from there, but this is preliminary. Call me or Paul 
Allen if you have any problems (265-7553). Bill Gates"

A few years ago, I put up a private web page for Gavin that has the same 
phone number on it. These pages are from our 1975 MITS BASIC manual. It may 
seem odd now, but Bill and Paul used to be customer support for MITS. I used 
to talk to them and Monte Davidoff quite often then. The URL for that page is:

     http://aics-research.com/nostalgia2.html

Wirt Atmar

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September 18, 2000


A Tale of the Tape From the Days When Microsoft Was Still Micro Soft

By JOHN MARKOFF
 
As Microsoft celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, the company is 
unlikely to call attention to another formative event 25 years ago: the day 
someone stole Bill Gates's software.

But the heist, now shrouded in equal parts mystery and industry folklore, 
gave an early glimpse of the hard-nosed approach Mr. Gates, Microsoft's 
chairman, has long taken to the software business. And the fierce debate that 
the theft ignited a quarter-century ago remains relevant today, as the 
industry engages in a war of words and lawsuits over whether computer 
software and digital information should be bought and sold or freely shared.

Even today, there is disagreement over who actually stole the software. But 
computer industry lore has it that on June 10, 1975, at a demonstration room 
set up in a Silicon Valley hotel suite, someone's stealthy hand reached into 
a cardboard box and removed a long roll of paper tape punched with holes. The 
tape contained Altair Basic, the programming language for the machine that 
heralded the birth of the personal computer era.

Written by William H. Gates and Paul G. Allen, the software, which would soon 
be renamed Micro Soft Basic, was one of the earliest programs of practical 
use for the first personal computer aimed at the hobbyist, the MITS Altair. 
The program had been adapted from the educational programming language 
invented for mainframe computers by the Dartmouth mathematicians John G. 
Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. Mr. Gates, who would drop out of Harvard the next 
year, had rushed to develop the program with a friend from his high school 
days in Seattle, Mr. Allen, after seeing a picture of the Altair computer on 
the cover of Popular Electronics magazine.

The maker, MITS, initially provided no software with the machines, assuming 
users would be willing not only to assemble them from kits but also to 
program the devices. It was Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen who exercised the impulse 
that would eventually make their soon-to-be-founded company, originally named 
Micro Soft, one of the world's most powerful corporations: create software 
that put computing power in the hands of everyday people.

Their creation also almost immediately set off an ideological debate among 
the community of computer hobbyists and hackers: should software be a freely 
shared utility or a commercial product? The issue created a deep and lasting 
chasm in the computer world that is spreading to virtually every aspect of 
today's information economy — including video games and digitally rendered 
music and movies. "This set the stage for the debate that continues even 
today over whether software should be free and how you deal with a technology 
where copying costs nothing," said Steven Levy, the author of the book 
"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution."

Back in 1975, MITS was a company in transition. It had started out as maker 
of control systems for model rockets, and its original name had been Micro 
Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. Now it was trying to promote a new 
concept — personal computing — and the company sent a van known as the 
MITS-mobile around the country to show off the Altair, using the Gates- Allen 
software to demonstrate the machine's capabilities. 

While demonstrating the Altair in a packed hotel conference room at Rickeys 
Hyatt House in Palo Alto, Calif., a MITS employee was having trouble loading 
the software on the machine, which was performed by pulling a paper tape 
through a mechanical reader to install a program. Distracted by his efforts, 
the employee and his audience paid no attention to a nearby box containing 
copies of the tape.

Although no one has ever claimed to have seen the thief remove the software, 
the tape — or a copy of it — somehow reached Dan Sokol, a semiconductor 
engineer at the Silicon Valley chip maker Signetics.

Mr. Sokol was a member of a small band of computer hobbyists who had recently 
formed the now legendary Homebrew Computer Club, which before it disbanded in 
1986 was a seedbed for the personal computer revolution. The club's members 
founded some of the most influential companies of the first wave of the PC 
era — including Cromemco, Processor Technology and Apple Computer. (Despite 
its historic role, MITS soon ran into financial difficulties and was acquired 
in May 1977 by Pertec, a maker of computer disk drives and tape drives.) 

Mr. Sokol recalls having few qualms about being in possession of a free copy 
of the Gates-Allen program. In his view, MITS was cheating hobbyists by 
charging $500 for buggy software. He took the tape to work and used a 
high-speed paper-tape machine to make 50 copies, which he carried to the next 
Homebrew meeting a few days later. The principle of sharing software was 
already a tenet for many members of the Homebrew club. Several members, for 
example, had collaborated on their own program for the Altair, called Tiny 
Basic, which they gave to anyone who wanted it. 

"This was something we were doing for the community, and anybody who added to 
it was welcomed," recalled Dennis Allison, a microprocessor designer who was 
a co- author of Tiny Basic and who founded Dr. Dobbs, an early programmer's 
journal.

Lee Felsenstein, a Silicon Valley computer designer who became the club's 
first moderator, established a system in which rolls of paper tape were 
donated by placing them on a skewer-like pointer.

"I would say, `Remember to bring back more copies than you take,' " Mr. 
Felsenstein recalled.

The meeting to which Mr. Sokol brought copies of the stolen tape was held at 
a auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, adjacent to the 
Stanford University campus. When the session ended, dozens of computer 
hackers rushed to the front of the room to claim copies of Altair Basic. 

"I told the people who had a computer they could be first in line and the 
people who had just ordered one had to stand behind them," Mr. Sokol recalled 
in a recent phone interview.

Months later, when Mr. Gates learned that his software was being widely 
shared by computer hobbyists, he sent an angry letter to several PC 
newsletters and magazines, accusing the hobbyists of piracy. 

"As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your 
software," Mr. Gates wrote, employing sarcasm: "Hardware must be paid for, 
but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it 
get paid?"

Some in the club embraced Mr. Sokol's opinion that the Gates-Allen program 
was not worth the price being charged. Others contended that any price at all 
was unreasonable to ask for the intangible 1's and 0's that animate digital 
computers.

Despite the free-software hacker ethic, however, some Homebrew members found 
themselves in an uncomfortable position as they realized that, like it or 
not, software was emerging as a business. 

"I wanted the Homebrew club not to be known for distributing illicit copies," 
recalled Gordon French, a co-founder, who was the club's librarian. "But I 
was a voice of moderation, and despite my protestations I never refused to 
give away copies."

If anything, the issues raised by the hobbyists' dispute with the young Bill 
Gates, are even more contentious in today's digital world. Legal wars are 
raging over the creation of Internet file sharing software, like Napster, 
that make it possible to share virtual any digital information — whether it 
is music, video or software code — without regard to copyrights.

And the original hackers' impulse to share their work has endured in the so- 
called open source software movement, which has created free software like 
the Gnu programming tools and the Linux operating system — the software that 
open- source enthusiasts see as the antidote to Microsoft's Windows.

Something else has endured: the original mystery of who stole the tape at 
Rickeys Hyatt House. To this day no one has stepped forward to claim credit. 
Two histories of the personal computer, Mr. Levy's "Hackers" and "Gates: How 
Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry — and Made Himself the Richest Man 
in America," by Paul Andrews and Stephen Manes, refer to the incident, but 
neither names a culprit.

And Mr. Sokol still refuses to identify who gave him the tape. "I made a 
promise 25 years ago that I would not tell who did give me the tape," he 
said, "and I'm going to hold to it."

One early computer hacker, Steve Dompier, whose name often arises when the 
old- timers speculate on the matter, has steadfastly insisted he is innocent. 

Mr. Dompier, who in 1975 was a a 30-year- old carpenter in Berkeley and the 
hobbyist credited with having assembled the first working MITS Altair from a 
kit, does acknowledge being present in the demonstration room. 

"I know a lot of people think I stole it, but I didn't," he said during an 
interview at his home in Bigfork, Mont. "I had gotten a copy from Bill 
earlier." In fact, Mr. Dompier has saved a copy of a handwritten letter from 
Mr. Gates at about that same time, thanking him for helping find and fix bugs 
in the program.

David Bunnell, who was an early employee of MITS and is now publisher of the 
Silicon Valley magazine Upside, says the mystery may never be solved. "Nobody 
really knows who did it," said Mr. Bunnell. 

In fact, Mr. Bunnell is not even convinced that it was the stolen copy that 
ended up in Mr. Sokol's hands. "Anyone who had bought a copy could have given 
it to him."

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