The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 90

Allen would sometimes come in late and might even think it was permissible to leave work in time for dinner. But not Gates and his close coterie. “It was hard-core,” he recalled. “A small group and me would work late into the night. And I’d sometimes stay all night and then sleep in the office and my secretary would come wake me up if we had a meeting.”⁷⁰

Born with a risk-taking gene, Gates would cut loose late at night by driving at terrifying speeds up the mountain roads to an abandoned cement plant. “Sometimes I wondered why Bill drove so fast,” Allen said. “I decided it was his way of letting off steam. He’d get so wound up in our work that he needed a way to stop thinking about the business and the code for a while. His breakneck driving wasn’t so different from table stakes poker or edge-of-the-envelope waterskiing.” Once they had made a little money, Gates splurged on a green Porsche 911, which he would race along the freeway after midnight. At one point he complained to his local dealer that the car’s top speed was supposed to be 126 miles per hour, but he could get it up only to 121. Late one night he was caught speeding and got into an argument with the cop about why he wasn’t carrying a driver’s license. He was thrown into jail. “Got arrested,” he said when Allen picked up the phone. He was released in a few hours, but his mug shot from that night became a memorable icon of geek history.⁷¹

Gates’s intensity paid off. It allowed Microsoft to meet software deadlines that seemed insane, beat other competitors to the market for each new product, and charge such a low price that computer manufacturers rarely thought of writing or controlling their own software.

SOFTWARE WANTS TO BE FREE

In June 1975, the month that Gates moved to Albuquerque, Roberts decided to send the Altair on the road as if it were a carnival show exhibit. His goal was to spread the word about the Altair’s wonders and create fan clubs in towns across America. He tricked out a Dodge camper van, dubbed it the MITS Mobile, and sent it on a sixty-town tour up the coast of California then down to the Southeast, hitting such hot spots as Little Rock, Baton Rouge, Macon, Huntsville, and Knoxville.

Gates, who went along for part of the ride, thought it was a neat marketing ploy. “They bought this big blue van and they went around the country and created computer clubs everyplace they went,” he marveled.⁷² He was at the shows in Texas, and Allen joined them when they got to Alabama. At the Huntsville Holiday Inn, sixty people, a mix of hippyish hobbyists and crew-cut engineers, paid $10 to attend, then about four times the cost of a movie. The presentation lasted three hours. At the end of a display of a lunar landing game, doubters peered under the table suspecting that there were cables to some bigger minicomputer hidden underneath. “But once they saw it was real,” Allen recalled, “the engineers became almost giddy with enthusiasm.”⁷³

One of the stops was at Rickeys Hyatt House hotel in Palo Alto on June 5. There a fateful encounter occurred after Microsoft BASIC was demonstrated to a group of hobbyists, including many from the recently formed Homebrew Computer Club. “The room was packed with amateurs and experimenters eager to find out about this new electronic toy,” the Homebrew’s newsletter reported.⁷⁴ Some of them were also eager to act on the hacker credo that software should be free. This was not surprising given the social and cultural attitudes, so different from the entrepreneurial zeal in Albuquerque, that had flowed together in the early 1970s leading up to the formation of the Homebrew Club.

Many of the Homebrew members who met the MITS Mobile had built an Altair and been waiting impatiently to get hold of the BASIC program that Gates and Allen had produced. Some had already sent checks to MITS for it. So they were thrilled to see that the Altairs on display were running a version of it. Indulging in the imperative of hackers, one of the members, Dan Sokol, “borrowed” the punched paper tape that had the program and used a DEC PDP-11 to make copies.⁷⁵ At the next Homebrew meeting, there was a cardboard box filled with dozens of BASIC tapes for members to take.^III There was one stipulation: you had to make a few copies to replenish the communal box. “Remember to bring back more copies than you take,” Lee Felsenstein joked. It was his signature line for any software sharing.⁷⁶ Thus did Microsoft BASIC spread freely.

This, not surprisingly, infuriated Gates. He wrote a passionate open letter, displaying all the tact of a nineteen-year-old, which served as the opening shot in the war over the protection of intellectual property in the age of personal computers:

An Open Letter to Hobbyists . . .

Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.

The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these “users” never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Is this fair? One thing you don’t do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. . . . One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft. . . .

I would appreciate letters from anyone who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.

Bill Gates

General Partner, Micro-Soft

The letter was printed in the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter and also the Altair user group’s Computer Notes and the People’s Computer Company.⁷⁷ It stirred up a frenzy. “I got a lot of shit,” Gates admitted. Of the three hundred letters he received, only five had a voluntary payment. Most of the rest heaped abuse on him.⁷⁸

Basically, Gates was correct. The creation of software was just as valuable as the creation of hardware. Those who made software deserved to be compensated. If they weren’t, people would quit writing software. By resisting the hacker ethos that anything that could be copied should be free, Gates helped ensure the growth of the new industry.

Still, there was a certain audacity to the letter. Gates was, after all, a serial stealer of computer time, and he had manipulated passwords to hack into accounts from eighth grade through his sophomore year at Harvard. Indeed, when he claimed in his letter that he and Allen had used more than $40,000 worth of computer time to make BASIC, he omitted the fact that he had never actually paid for that time and that much of it was on Harvard’s military-supplied computer, funded by American taxpayers. The editor of one hobbyist newsletter wrote, “Rumors have been circulating through the hobby computer community that imply that development of the BASIC referred to in Bill Gates’s letter was done on a Harvard University computer provided at least in part with government funds and that there was some question as to the propriety if not the legality of selling the results.”⁷⁹