Silicon Valley User Abuse Started with Bill Gates

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Silicon Valley user abuse started with Bill Gates

[This is a preview excerpt from "Deaver on Cybersecurity: An irreverent and honest exposé of the online security problem, complete with a candid and thorough reveal of its solution" by F. Scott Deaver, now available from Amazon Kindle as eBook (with free versions), paperback, and hardcover at https://www.amazon.com/Deaver- Cybersecurity-irreverent-security-complete- ebook/dp/B07ZG9YBPT/ref=sr_1_1?crid=8SRF0SSU42WX&keywords=d eaver+on+cybersecurity&qid=1578669299&s=digital- text&sprefix=Deaver%2Cdigital-text%2C190&sr=1-1.]

Deliberate cybersecurity vendor malfeasance

Cyberextortion - leveraging and promoting fear of hacking to sell cybersecurity products that do not work - is a thriving and lucrative business in Silicon Valley. It is an unregulated for-profit subset of an industry run by corrupt mercenary bean-counters with no regard for technical competence. It should be no surprise to anyone that cyberextortion would spring from the commercial side of the software industry.

In the early 1980s, the computer world was split between two very distinct and large groups with a vast unpopulated no-man's-land between them. In the one corner, we had well-entrenched and well- heeled hulking mercenary monoliths and bullies, consisting of IBM, Digital (DEC)[1], ITT[2], AT&T[3], Xerox[4], Honeywell[5], the major players in the military-industrial complex[6] remaining after the Vietnam war buildup, and the Fortune 500 companies generally[7] - all incestuously-related and intertwined over the providing and consumption of mainframe computers and services. This would be the group represented by "Hal 9000" of "Space Odyssey: 2001"[8] fame.

In the other corner, far, far away, we have the academic community and hobbyists, including the likes of USC[9], MIT[10], UC Berkeley[11], the math departments of most major universities in the country, and the online (via dialup modem) community of CompuServe[12].

The world's most corrupt businesses in the age of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities[13] on the one side, and intelligent, well-intentioned naïve college students with no life experiences or industry familiarity on the other. Recruiters would traipse across the great divide seeking out the best and brightest academics during the school year; and upon graduation, the great migration looking for jobs and interviews in the opposite direction.

Then came the crass personal computer software pioneers to fill up the great void in the middle. Generally sociopathic, mercenary, privileged, and with some unique talent, intellect, idea, or hyper- aggression to accompany their trust-funds, senses of entitlement, pedigrees (in and out of the computer sciences), and with the moral fiber of the most corrupt of thieves, man-boys like Bill Gates[14], Steve Jobs[15], and Larry Ellison[16], along with dozens of others, rose to the fore in areas in and around personal computing and distributed networking, crashing the gap between the two broad camps that previously interacted in very narrow ways. A shark invades a goldfish bowl, and the PC commercial software industry is born

The intersection of Bill Gates and a group of well-meaning, naïve, not- yet-fully-baked tree-hugging students and computer geeks was akin to planting a pedophilic Catholic priest in the middle of a kindergarten playground at recess (though for the purposes of clarity, Gate's rape of his peers was purely intellectual, not sexual, as far as any known record would show). As an active hobbyist and hacker myself at the time (I am eleven months older than Bill Gates), I am intimately familiar with the environment around college campuses at the time. I was not a student, but was on campus at both Iowa State University[17] and at Drake University[18] on a daily basis for many years during this period working one-on-one with engineering and computer sciences students on prototypes and patents for my invention of the electric construction nail gun through the Center for Industrial Research and Service's[19],[20] (CIRAS) invention incubation program.

At the time, the academic attitude among most students towards the computer sciences was altruistic, to say the least. It was all about applying communal effort to a common good, open-source, and shared ideas towards collaborations that helped achieve universal understanding. Code was left on chalkboards, often written in math syntax that anyone could contribute to and discuss. There simply was, during those days, no place for the concept of "mercenary me". Bill Gates and his crowd, of course, changed all of that - "mercenary me" was in their DNA. But, none of them came to the game in any upfront or honest fashion - it was intellectual rape followed by an in-your-face "I am better than you" betrayal. And no one person illustrates this better than Bill Gates.

There is no question that Bill Gates is intelligent - but so, for that matter, is Ted Kaczynski[21]. And yes, the comparison is very relevant - both scored 1590 or above on their SATs and were admitted to Harvard at younger than 17 years of age on scholarship (a fascinating insight into the old SAT scores with specific reference to Kaczynski is contained in an article for the weekly Standard written by Stuart Koehl and entitled "Write Like the Unabomber"[22]).

Both Kaczynski and Gates possess high Intelligent Quotients (IQ)[23] - at 165 versus 160, Kaczynski has the "advantage", though there is a theory out there that says there's an optimum IQ for conventional success (about 130) and that people who deviate too far from it (in either direction) tend to be at risk for failure by society’s standards.[24]

Both Kaczynski and Gate also possess well-below-average Emotional Quotients (EQ)[25],[26],[27],[28] - neither scores well on EQ assessments of their massive collections of publicly-available materials (something Bill Gates has recently begun acknowledging, to his credit[29],[30],[31]). Here Gates has the advantage over Kaczynski - neither has anything like genuine empathy, and both Kaczynski and Gates can detect enough of a person's emotional state to protect themselves against it and manipulate/leverage it to their advantage to some degree, but Gates is better at the latter and can also simulate empathy to a certain extent, which Kaczynski simply cannot do. In terms of their Moral Quotients (MQ)[32],[33],[34],[35], neither Gates nor Kaczynski could manage a convincing toddler's crawl out of their mother's basements. Both are true narcissists and sociopaths with a robust supporting history in the public record, with Kaczynski having the more violent criminal bent and Gates having the enormous economic advantage, able to crush dissenters and whistle-blowers, and buy his way out of criminal trouble with the largest law enforcement agencies on Earth[36],[37]. Gates has used his bullying influence in philanthropy to force solutions they don't want on ignorant, impoverished third-world cultures[38],[39],[40],[41] (other than the "third-world" part, all of that should sound familiar to victims of Windows 95), and then in turn has tried to leverage that manufactured image to revise history (all while continuing to evade his fair share of taxes[42]!).

[With respect to taxes, Gates showed how out of touch he was with the rest of us when he famously declared in a statement of genuinely Trumpian excess during a 2014 BBC interview[43], "I've paid more tax than any individual ever, and gladly so ... I've paid over $6 billion in taxes." The problem with that is, of course, that even if true, he paid only $6 billion in taxes on $145 billion in earnings and capital gains against a retained net worth of $101 billion (at its peak). That is a tax rate between 4.14% and 5.94%, depending upon how it is calculated. For comparison, in the same year that the statement was made (2014), the average American individual taxpayer paid $13,414 in taxes against an income of $53,657[44], a tax rate of 25.00%. So, yes, while Gates paid more in taxes than most people in terms of gross dollars, that was merely because his accumulated net worth from all his earning was roughly two million times more than the average American's annual earnings! But by percentage, Gates raped other American taxpayers, paying only one-quarter what they did in taxes. By any measure of fairness, Gates should repay the American taxpayer between $19.25 billion and $30.25 billion, the difference between the 25.00% tax he should have paid and the $6 billion he claims he actually paid.]

And the idea of a bullying, tax-dodging "philanthropist" spending money that he saved himself by paying society less than he owed for his crimes (peddling mercenary incompetence on a massive scale at an extraordinary profit through an illegal monopoly) seems a little muddied to you, welcome to the world of Bill Gates. And by no coincidence whatsoever, since he contributed so extensively to it, welcome to the equally muddy world of cyberextortion.

And I am fully aware that there are any number of people in Bill Gate's world as well as in cyberextortion that see no mud whatsoever - the distinction is one of the moral code, or lack thereof) of the viewer (the idea of a self-determined moral code is an oxymoron of sorts, since morality is decided by community standards, not by individuals). Bill Gates, for all his money, intelligence, talent, and accomplishments, is immoral - you simply cannot be a narcissist and/or a sociopath and be moral, because morality is at its core a community exercise, one in which empathy is a necessary factor in extracting standards of right and wrong from all the competing needs and interests of a group of people. That cyberextortion is immoral is a little easier to understand, because the shield of "success" it can hide behind is limited to the mercenary returns to its sleazy supporters - its myriad abject technical failings cannot be reasonably debated.

The issue of morality is one that is incredibly important to true cybersecurity (beyond merely distinguishing it from cyberextortion), as it is to all form of security generally. Before we go further, let's look at the first paragraph of the current Wikileaks definition of morality[45]:

"Morality (from Latin: moralis, lit. 'manner, character, proper behavior') is the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper.[1] Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal.[2] Morality may also be specifically synonymous with 'goodness' or 'rightness'."

In cybersecurity, we'd like to be dealing with understandings of morality that are as universal as possible. There are some moral questions that would seem to be - murder, you would think, would be a universally immoral thing, as would adultery. Both are manifested as one or more of seven deadly sins[46], both are referenced in the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament[47] (meaning they are embraced as sins by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike), and every dominant religion has prohibitions against both[48],[49],[50].

However, in actual practice, this universal morality, even for murder and adultery, is hard to pin down. Today, for example, we have a racist orange imbecile for a president who regularly murders little children invited here by our Statue of Liberty in New York harbor ("Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!") by denying them food, water, and medical care after traversing a barren desert, and putting them in harm's way separating them from their parents. Despite this egregious violation of universal morality, no penalty of any kind has been paid by the murderer. The self-same orange imbecile is an admitted adulterer having had sex with porn stars on numerous occasions while his wife was pregnant, and yet nonetheless has become the leader of the free world with the support of racist hypocrite "Christian" evangelicals[51],[52] (albeit by losing the popular vote, with 10 million, 699 thousand, and 620 more adult individuals of the population voting against the malignant narcissist than voted for him[53] - he came in second to Hillary Clinton, who had by far the highest vote tally).

The most powerful person in the free world (along with Bill Gates - such excellent examples of leaders, these two) does not pay his fair share of taxes, famously and flagrantly exploiting loopholes in the law - paying one's fair share of taxes is another presumed universal morality (it had been the last remaining moral red line for politicians).

So, there are issues in the presumption of universal morality. Even the morality of murder, as illustrated above, can be gotten around if you are racist or depraved enough - blacks, minorities, and other others in this and other countries have been regularly murdered without penalty by classifying them as "non-human". A raging debate has been on-going for more than 50 years[54] over whether fetuses are human enough to be murdered.

In addition to questions pertaining to universal morality, there are other issues of morality we know are not universal at all. These are those to which the U.S. Supreme Court applies the term "community standards", first applied in Roth v. United States[55], and then clarified in Miller v. California[56]. Finally, certain aspects of morality are deeply personal, subject to an understanding, or sometimes even formal agreement, at the time at which two people engage each other for some purpose, and ahered to by them alone for the terms of the agreement.

So, clearly, at least some aspects of morality are variable. From the perspective of personal security, some morality is universal, and should never be subject to variability, and some morality is variable, but once agreed to by the parties should from that point forward be inviolate.

Certitude Digital's AMULET™ technologies are currently the only cybersecurity technologies on the planet which fully embrace and support, not only morality in the same sense it is practiced in the analog (real) world, but the concept of variable morality mutually frozen into an instance of agreement.

Fortunately, some issues of morality (the aforementioned murders and adultery, for example) are outside the purview of cybersecurity. And for Certitude Digital, the base universal morality is without exception Western intellectual property law - an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on intellectual property[57]:

"The main purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage the creation of a wide variety of intellectual goods.[9] To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to the information and intellectual goods they create, usually for a limited period of time. This gives economic incentive for their creation, because it allows people to profit from the information and intellectual goods they create.[9] These economic incentives are expected to stimulate innovation and contribute to the technological progress of countries, which depends on the extent of protection granted to innovators.[10] ."

Certitude Digital shares with me the fundamental conviction that one's right to reasonably benefit from one's original ideas and creations, to the exclusion of others who do not have express permission, is inalienable, a guarantee emanating from the unique brain cases each of us is born with. As such, that morality is irretrievably baked into Certitude Digital AMULET™s. Yes, we are aware there are many geopolitical jurisdictions in the world who do not respect Western intellectual property rights, or who give them lip service in order to remain in the World Trade Organization[58], chief among these mainland China[59], along with other socialist[60], Communist[61], and repressive countries[62].

An even greater number of countries and governmental units respect Western intellectual property rights only to the extent it benefits their elites and contitutents (that is, they can profit by it in some way) - these include India, Israel, and the Federal Trade Commission (referencing especially 'Net neutrality[63]).

To those jurisdictions, we have but two words: "Screw you." Actually, let me add three more: "Go to hell." [We have some others, but we do not want this book subjected to any parental restrictions.] We are not pansy- @ssed cowards like some of our "bone-spurs", balls-less, and/or Jello- spined contemporaries (looking at you, Google[64],[65], Apple[66], and Amazon[67],[68]), will not honor or respect censorship, and will do anything in our power to help our clients work around any restrictions. In support of the universality of Western intellectual property rights as morality, Certitude Digital AMULET™-protected digital assets are individually uniquely- and multiply-enciphered, free to cross any geographic or political boundaries at will, undecipherable to anyone but the intended addressee or destinations.

Certitude Digital AMULET™s entirely, and dynamically, support variable morality ensconced at a given moment in time as part of an agreement with respect to exchange of intellectual property. It so happens that, with respect to intellectual property, all morality expresses itself as a singular binary question at point of access, "Is granting access to this digital asset the morally right thing to do now?" with the variable morality against which the question is to be tested conveniently supplied, at the same moment, by one or more AMULET™s controlling access to the enciphered digital asset.

Although the workings of AMULET™s will be described in great detail in the second half of this book, you should know that the morality alluded to above is expressed, by each stakeholder in the intellectual property embedded into a digital asset, through a series of one or more environmental questions that can be answered "yes" or "no" to that stakeholder's satisfaction, which are stored into an AMULET™ representing that stakeholder and linked to the digital asset with a unique AMULET™ ID enciphered into the asset. These questions can be as simple as "is johnsmith123 the user name of the user currently logged onto the host device?", or "is the host device's current location within the GPS polygon bounds for Wisconsin?", or "is the time between xx:xx and xx:xx?", or one of thousands of other possibilities. These can be grouped together, as many or as few as the stakeholder wishes, with access being approved by this stakeholder only if all his/her questions can be answered "yes" at the point in time the AMULET™ frameworks requests access on behalf of the digital asset. These sets of questions can be unique to this digital asset, or an AMULET™ can be linked to many distinct and different digital assets.

And, just as in the analog (real) world, an AMULET™-protected digital asset can be linked to multiple stakeholders through AMULET™ IDs bound into their enciphered contents. The "yes/no" morality question as to accessing the digital asset is answered "yes" only if each and every of all of the questions in any associated AMULET™ can be answered "yes".

As you can see from the foregoing, the consideration and application of morality are highly critical to the practice and science of cybersecurity, and their inclusion and examination in a book about cybersecurity absolutely rightful and required. In fact, to not address morality, in the face of the immoral barons of cyberextortion having substituted profiteering and crass manipulation in its place, would itself be criminal, and a further disservice to true cybersecurity.

So, and so that you know, in the spirit of openness and transparency, these are the moral standards I proudly believe in, bring to this discussion, and try my best to adhere to myself. And it is those standards I will apply here to the material I present here referencing Bill Gates and his character.

I don't think any single event more completely encapsulates who Bill Gates is, or stands as a better metaphor for what his career later became, than the one in the Wikipedia page describing what occurred when he was a mere 13 years old: "At 13, he enrolled in the Lakeside School, a private preparatory school[27] and wrote his first software program.[28] When Gates was in the eighth grade, the Mothers' Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students.[29] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he said, "There was just something neat about the machine."[30] After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students – Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans – for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[31][32]"

Just as with Ted Kaczynski, an exploration of the young Gates speaks volumes about what he was later to become.

At thirteen, of course, Gates had had no opportunity to serve his country or to meet any obligation to its full conclusion as a matter of being the right thing to do or follow through to complete anything to the point of polishing it to perfection.

But it is telling that in all of the fifty-one years since (at the time of this writing), and despite being for long stretches of that period the richest, and as powerful as any, person in the world, Gates was somehow never able to serve his own country (as did other privileged people like Pat Tillman[69], John McCain[70], Elvis Presley[71], Alec Guinness[72], Henry Kissinger[73], and Clark Gable[74]) or to complete his Harvard degree (college isn’t merely about education - it is about maturing and extending one's horizons). Gates was never able to build any software program, even with all those talented developers and all that money at his disposal, that stands the test of time as being very good (this would primarily include the Windows operating system - as a friend of mine who wishes not to be named is fond of saying of Windows 10, "Wait, thirty million lines of code, thirty-four years of development from the richest software company in the world, and this is the crap we end up with?!?").

But let's look at the context around the thirteen-year-old Bill Gates. Here we have a child so privileged that he has access to timeshares on a mainframe computer - in 1975 - provided by his mommy and her friends, through rummage sales. For comparison's sake, let me ask two questions: How many of our readers had wealthy stay-at-home mothers with the kind of power and access who could buy us mainframe computer time in 1975 through rummage sales of designer-brand kid's clothing? Do you think "level playing field" should be considered when considering anyone's accomplishments against someone else's?

Much has been made about Bill Gates' early computer acumen, but having seen his work I would argue that if you took the same opportunities and put them in front of any number of kids that age (even some from the inner city and Deep South[75],[76],[77],[78]), they could accomplish much more significant things even in the absence of the entitlement that goes with white privilege.

But Bill Gates went the other direction - he went full hacker on his privileges, choosing to steal from the largesse he's been granted, disdaining the intent of the gifts given him by the generosity of all those who contributed to his "growth" through those garage sale purchases (including his own mother).

At that very same time the thirteen-year-old Gates was biting the hands that fed him by stealing thousands of dollars of computer time from beneficiaries and getting slapped on the wrist for it with a mere ban, children the same age from lesser walks of life (the majority of them persons of color) were being jailed, sent to juvenile detention, or deported to boarding schools for far less significant offenses.

How would I, also male and white and now old, know this, you ask? I spent my own twelfth and thirteenth years at Omaha Home for Boys[79], then a private juvenile detention facility (for the high crime of running away from home after my father beat me on more than one occasion with a leather belt for substituting water for BrylCreem[80] in my hair as fashions changed in the 1960s), and then on to Eldora State Training School for Boys, a state juvenile delinquent incarceration facility (after I'd escaped being locked in a metal 5' by 6' cell in my underwear for three days at Omaha Home for Boys for questioning a science teacher's presentation of "facts" in class). Yes, I could have avoided some of that by taking Ritalin[81] (white males dominated society in those days in large part through pharmaceuticals and segregation - phenobarbital for the uppity women, Ritalin for the uppity kids, and nooses for the uppity blacks), but hey, gotta be me… Oh, and by the way, the idea of "male white privilege" can be just as racist as any other concept based on skin color - I know I have never personally benefitted from the idea in any way.

[My point here is to expose the disparities and realities of the time and their role in the success of some people over others - but be careful about making any further down-the-road pop-culture-psychology assumptions about me or my agenda as a result. I have enjoyed, and am grateful for, a stellar and extraordinary career doing exactly what I love, making a very nice living in large part compensating for all Gates' and Microsoft's massive screwups.

I have, as a result, a deep and broad understanding of life Gates' will never achieve, and I am deeply thankful every day for that early training as a slight, lanky kid fending off bullies - both of these have empowered my ability to innovate on many levels, and they primarily have fueled the courage to incessantly explore and to ask questions that others fear, or don’t think, to ask.

I have no doubt that my innovations and courage will, one hundred years from now, result in a legacy that will equal or exceed anything Bill Gates is remembered for, a competition only he cares about. But no matter how it should turn out, I will be happy, and I will not have had to spend billions to buy respectability from anyone to feel worthwhile.]

But here's the fascinating big reveal of Bill Gates' life - for all his gifts, for all that entitlement, for all that wealth, for all that power, for all that time in the gold chair, the man has never innovated anything. Not one damned thing. Ever. That's an astonishing thing for someone who regularly calls himself an "entrepreneur". That lack of innovation is something we'll come back around to in a little while, but even the label "entrepreneur" applied to someone like Bill Gates is highly problematic (and to many of us who have earned the title, we find that application insulting).

Anyone who understands and respects anything about entrepreneurship realizes there are four essential elements to it: Innovation (creating something novel that wasn't there before); risk- taking (placing a meaningful gamble on your own ideas by putting things you have earned or built yourself in harm's way); work ethic and perseverance; and pure dumb luck.

Of these, a solid argument can be made (one we will be making shortly) that Gates has never created anything original of note (the best that can be said of him is that he is like the chef who merely takes other people's recipes and adds MSG[82], where his version of MSG is mercenary self-serving greed) and that he has never had to take a meaningful risk.

Of the remaining two requirements of entrepreneurial endeavors, there can be no question as to Gates' luck - the silver spoon at birth, the intersection of personality, intellect, preferences and greed with unpoliced opportunities in an emerging industry (unguarded henhouse to a fox), even skirting large parts of what he owes society for his monopolistic crimes through being able to trade the public's rights to security (back doors into Windows encryption[83]) for leniency from the Justice Department[84]. The question of work ethic and perseverance is an interesting one. I have no doubt that if you put Gates, Paul Allen[85], and Steve Ballmer[86] under sodium thiopental[87], you’d discover they genuinely believe they actually worked their little butts off and made great sacrifices in order to build Microsoft - they are a bunch of spoiled privileged trust-fund babies who have lived all their lives coddled among other spoiled privileged trust-fund babies, and simply have nothing real to compare their efforts to.

Does that make what they believe so? Hardly. It terms of calories expended over what duration, average heartbeats per minute, or mean adrenaline level in the bloodstream over the course of the effort, none of what Gates and his cronies contributed comes even remotely close to what the representative entrepreneur has had to expend to achieve even a tiny portion of the same success (we'll touch on this some more when we talk about the whinier aspects of Gates' "Open Letter"). But for all of that, Gates' team certainly made an effort, possibly even an extraordinary one in comparison with his well- heeled, jet-set-parented peers. We'll give him a C- for work ethic.

But let's go back to the matter of risk. Obviously, with wealthy parents with whom he maintained a good relationship and who had paid for everything (such that Gates never had a real job working for someone else - and it shows!), Gates has never been at the same risk of anything as the average citizen (his inheritance alone would have guaranteed him a sweet life without working for it).

Even the fact that he famously dropped out of Harvard to build Microsoft came without risk - in addition to his wealthy parental safety net (from the Wikipedia article on Bill Gates: "He had talked over this decision with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much their son wanted to start his own company."[88]), his Harvard education was never at risk, as Gates himself stated: "... if things [at Microsoft] hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on [a] leave [of absence]."[89]

Having no risk whatsoever at the very root, and with the root providing thereon hundreds of billions of dollars in risk insurance, you can make no sincere case whatsoever that Bill Gates has ever had to engage any kind of risk, certainly on no level that would be even minimally commensurate with that of the average true entrepreneur.

I am not comfortable comparing myself to Bill Gates because all such things are apples-to-oranges anyway (I acknowledge he is richer; I am the better man, for reasons that he would lack any capacity to understand), but mine is the only situation I know intimately - and, I have been told by those who know these things, that mine is far more typical of that faced by most entrepreneurs. In my case, I created innovative, non-derivative, intellectual property having significant technical merit (as recognized by the issuance of five U.S. patents by the USPTO[90]). In 2016, at 62 years of age (three years from traditional retirement), I added to that the entirety of my life savings accumulated over 35 years of self-education and often-hardscrabble consulting work across more than 74 projects (by liquidating under severe penalties my real property and my 401K to generate roughly half a million dollars that has gone into the business). I then put my exemplary personal reputation at risk to recruit some of the finest and most accomplished people I know (James Cardle and Scott Orman, among others) along with my and their significant others, to put their careers and reputations at grave risk to help me. With that risk propelling us, we have created very substantial repositories of validated code, a dozen more items of additional intellectual property, this book, and more than a dozen applications and demos, with no more bodies available to us than ourselves, over a very concise period of time.

And, as noted, that kind of risk-taking is very typical of what a modern entrepreneur is required to put forth in a viable, meaningful startup today.

Irrespective of what else he may have done, it is clear Gates took no risks that even begin approximating those expected of a true entrepreneur.

So, given Gates' paltry performance against the four known criteria of a true modern entrepreneur and the challenges the rest of us have faced, you'll pardon me if I snicker whenever the "entrepreneur" label is applied to Bill Gates. The fact that he lucked into the most dominant and wealthiest software company on earth does not make him an entrepreneur by the modern definition; it makes him a highly competitive greedy opportunist starting out with an incredible advantage, which is something else entirely.

I promised, before following our rabbit trail into the other elements of entrepreneurship, that I'd circle back and delve into Bill Gates' complete absence of real innovation throughout his career - I am mesmerized by the fact it is an astonishing omission for someone who has pocketed as much money from software development as he has. BASIC was a language invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz[91] eleven long years before Gates ported the language to the Altair 8800 in 1975, one of many such ports that had been done by many other people into many other systems, including the DEC PDP- 11[92] that Gates ported his version from. One of the many stunning hypocrisies of Gate's later "Open Letter to Hobbyists" is the fact that Gates paid not one penny - zero, zilch, nada, zip, bupkis - to Kemeny or Kurtz for the use of their work, despite the billions of dollars that ultimately wound up in Gates' pocket because of if… can you say "ingrate pissant with an overblown sense of entitlement?".

Just so you know, porting of code someone else has invented to a different platform is an entry-level or journeyman software development task that has been done a hundred times a day in bedrooms, garages, college dorms, academic labs, and company facilities across the globe since at least the 1960s, as often as not for no compensation whatsoever (another real-world truth that makes Gates' "Open Letter" ring so hollow).

Xerox's Xparc[93], Apple's Macintosh[94], and IBM's OS/2 (under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci)[95] all preceded Gates' Windows operating system with every single element that appears in Windows (in fact, most of the Windows 3.0 GUI was borrowed directly from OS/2[96],[97]).

Innovations in Windows NT? Seriously? Bill Gates purloined DEC's[98] extensive innovations and investment in business operating systems, notably the VMS operating system used in VAX computers[99], by poaching its principal lead, Dave Cutler[100] - a practice considered so repugnant even by morally-debased Silicon Valley standards that the titans of the industry later banded together to create an illegal "no-poach" scheme to stop it[101],[102].

All Bill Gates has ever added to anything was greed. Even his philanthropy has been tainted by loud complaints about his imposition of corporate bullying, his political manipulations, the introduction of mercenary agendas, and the lack of patience and excellence.

Mugshots of 22-year-old Gates following his 1977 arrest for a traffic violation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. From the Bill Gates Wikipedia article: "In 2008, Gates appeared in a series of ads to promote Microsoft. The first commercial, co-starring Jerry Seinfeld, is a 90-second talk between strangers as Seinfeld walks up on a discount shoe store (Shoe Circus) in a mall and notices Gates buying shoes inside. The salesman is trying to sell Mr. Gates shoes that are a size too big. As Gates is buying the shoes, he holds up his discount card, which uses a slightly altered version of his own mugshot of his arrest in New Mexico in 1977, for a traffic violation.[75]" Gates' own insecurities about his lack of real talents, or any meaningful contributions to actual progress forward in the industry, are reflected not only in his attempts through the philanthropy of his ill-gotten gains to purchase respect and revise history, but also in his petty jealousies. Recently, he has taken to lambasting the defenseless dead - for all his faults, Steve Jobs[103] was a true pioneer and had genuine design and craftsmanship talent Bill Gates simply does not have, paid severely for whatever errors he may have made, and deserves better than to have a bitter, burned-out billionaire gracelessly trashing him with faint praise after death[104]. Watch out, Billy, what goes around does indeed come back around.

Before leaving the subject of Bill Gates and his character (and by extension, the tone and model his character set for the seedy values and behaviors today so prevalent in Silicon Valley generally), I want to do a deep dive into something the young (but by then an adult) Gates did that further reveals who and what he has always been.

Other than an over-abiding interest in the morality of some of those things that have significance in my own path, I have no personal or emotional stake in Bill Gates' life - he is what he is, and had he not been there, someone else, perhaps worse, perhaps better, would have been in his place (even his theft of my Caller ID for E- mail[105] intellectual property was a learning experience from which I ultimately benefitted) - with one glaring exception.

That exception has to do with something Bill Gates wrote which he entitled "Open Letter to Hobbyists"[106] in February 1976, when he was 20 years old. Until picking it up again as part of the research for this book, I hadn’t really thought much about that letter for more than forty years, and that letter has the singular distinction of angering me as much today as it did when I first read it. You (more than likely) do not know me, but though passionate about what I do, I have an even temperament and have managed to get along with people throughout the United States and around the globe, crossing cultural, religious, and financial boundaries, on some of the most intense projects imaginable over a 50-year employment career (35 years in computer sciences). I've certainly never engaged in any act of violence outside a boxing ring (or any other inappropriate behaviors). But there are two people on this planet I would not hesitate to slap - yes, slap, because these are not men, at least to the degree they could withstand my straight right - across the face on general principle: one Donald J(ackass) Trump, and one William Henry Gates III. Bill Gates gets the honor for his letter.

As to Gate's letter, some background (from the Wikipedia article on Bill Gates[107]:

"After Gates read the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which demonstrated the Altair 8800, he contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.[49] In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS' interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS' offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC… "… Microsoft's Altair BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists[108] in the MITS newsletter in which he asserted that more than 90 percent of the users of Microsoft Altair BASIC had not paid Microsoft for it and by doing so the Altair "hobby market" was in danger of eliminating the incentive for any professional developers to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software.[51] This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment."

This was the full letter as it originally appeared:

Where to begin? Everything - every single line - in this letter is an outright lie, revision of history, perturbation of known fact, or deliberate attempt at misdirection. The entire purpose for it being written was because a spoiled brat wanted to bully hobbyists - not-for- profit hobbyists! - into paying him money in advance for a software product of no known value to run on a computer the hobbyist had likely built from scratch himself with his own bare hands from a do-it- yourself kit he'd learned about from a magazine. Think about that for a moment. These hobbyists were guys who were not trust-fund-babies - they were guys in school, or with real jobs, who were tinkerers and propeller-heads in their spare time. They weren't doing this for profit, their friends weren't doing this for profit, and nobody else involved with a hand-built Altair 8800 was doing it for a profit other than the kit manufacturer. And the kit manufacturer had terrible issues with quality control, such that he couldn't deliver quality memory modules required for the BASIC Module to run. From the Wikipedia article on Gates' "Open Letter"[109]:

"MITS offered a complete Altair system with two MITS 4K Dynamic RAM boards, a serial interface board and Altair BASIC for $995.[12] However the $264 MITS RAM boards were unreliable due to several component and design problems. An enterprising Homebrew Computer Club member, Robert Marsh, designed a 4K static memory that was plug-in compatible with the Altair 8800 and sold for $255.[13] His company was Processor Technology, one of the most successful Altair compatible board suppliers. Many Altair 8800 computer owners skipped the bundled package; purchased their memory boards from a third-party supplier and used a "borrowed" copy of Altair BASIC.

"Ed Roberts acknowledged the 4K Dynamic RAM board problems in the October 1975 Computer Notes. The price was reduced from $264 to $195 and existing purchasers got a $50 rebate."

So, in other words, the memory required to support the version of Altair BASIC shipped with the kit did not work. So, hobbyists didn’t buy that memory, and instead bought a third-party version of the memory boards which did work, and which worked with an unlicensed copy of Altair BASIC that happened to be lying around freely available.

How in the hell is that the fault of the hobbyists in any way, form, or fashion?

But the issue goes beyond that. The industry standard of that time was that BASIC (the exact same version of 6800 BASIC that Altair BASIC was ported from), and it was being provided by other (better) manufacturers of hobby computers: BASIC for the Commodore PET[110], the Apple II[111], the Radio Shack TRS-80[112].

Apple set the tone during and after the Altair 8800's product quality fiasco over BASIC[113]:

In early 1976 ads for its Apple I computer, Apple Inc made the claims that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost"[24] and "yes folks, Apple BASIC is Free".[25] Let's also not forget that Microsoft itself had actually already been paid for the licenses of its 6800 BASIC - a fixed-priced cash payment:

"Microsoft had already addressed the royalty issue: MITS would pay a fixed price, $31,200, for a non-exclusive license of 6800 BASIC."848

In other words, at the time Gates wrote his "Open Letter", he knew he had no standing whatsoever on the issue of licensing of the BASIC software.

As to the height of the pedestal for honesty on which Gates' would have had any right to stand, it is pretty short (actually, below ground). First, the computer time Gates and Allen used to port 6800 BASIC (later becoming Altair BASIC) from the PDP-10 BASIC written by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz[114] (to whom Gates and Allen have never paid a cent) was stolen from taxpayers and fellow students:

"Hal Singer of the Micro-8 Newsletter published an open letter to Ed Roberts of MITS. Hal pointed out that MITS promised a computer for $395, but the price for a working system was $1000. He suggested a class action lawsuit or a Federal Trade Commission investigation into false advertising was in order. Hal also noted that rumors were circulating that Bill Gates developed BASIC on a Harvard University computer that was funded by the US government. Why should customers pay for software already paid for by the taxpayer?[27]

"Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte Davidoff did use a PDP-10 at Harvard's Aiken Computer Center. The computer system was funded by the Department of Defense through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Harvard officials were not pleased that Gates and Allen (who was not a student) had used the PDP-10 to develop a commercial product, but determined that this military computer was not covered by any Harvard policy; the PDP-10 was controlled by Professor Thomas Cheatham, who felt that students could use the machine for personal use. Harvard placed restrictions on the computer's use, and Gates and Allen had to use a commercial time share computer in Boston to finalize the software.[28]"

As a reflection of their real characters, neither Gates nor his family also never paid a dime for that computer time Gates stole back when he was thirteen. That stolen time was forever taken from other students who might have used it to achieve more noble things in their life (for example, the application of computer science to medicine) than merely grub money from people for mediocre products on a massive scale. Gates certainly never repaid Harvard for the "personal" computer time he and Paul Allen misappropriated to do paid commercial development of 6800 BASIC. Ed Roberts (Gates' partner in Altair BASIC) called hobbyists who didn’t pay for the inoperable memory module and BASIC combination (or who solved the problem themselves) "thieves" and "parasites"[115], which, when the facts are known, was more than a little misdirected. There is no more prolific a thief or a parasite on the surface of the Earth than William Henry Gates III.

With that background information in hand, let me address Gate's "Open Letter" line by line:

· "To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself." Gates knew this was not true - he himself had benefited using plenty of "good software courses, books, and software" from universities and public libraries (as well as any he lifted in passing while exploiting stolen computer time). The issue to hobbyists was not one of availability - it was one of access and distribution. And a gentleman far more knowledgeable about business and life than Gates (then or now), Andrew Carnegie (you may have heard of him - he funded and built our public library system[116]) had established without doubt that the solution to access and distribution was making availability convenient and free, not through profiteering.

Oh, and I assume this would have been lost on a true narcissist anyway, but you do not start out a letter intended to persuade others with the words "To me, …"

· "Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted."

Somewhat irrelevant in this case, since without quality memory boards on which it can tun, the software is wasted (and therefore has no value, and shouldn't be purchased). This should have been written, "Without quality memory boards on which to run software, a hobby computer is wasted."

· "Will quality software be written for the hobby market?"

The answer, as it turned out, was "yes". For free, by Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack, among others. By Bill Gates for the Altair 8800? The answer is "no", not that would run on their memory boards, or for which hobbyists would therefore pay. · "Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby industry to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC."

"Hired" is a little too strong - Monte Davidoff was a student and summer intern for two summers (1975 and 1977, - of course,at the time of this letter, 1977 has not yet happened, and Davidoff is a proponent of open source, not commercial, software[117]). And Altair BASIC wasn't developed so much as ported from 6800 BASIC code already developed - for which Microsoft had already been paid a $31,000 fixed license fee. (Gates tacitly affirms this when he reveals in the next sentence that the "development" took just two months).

· "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."

Patently untrue in several respects, this statement is misleading in others. Davidoff was a student and summer intern, and dropped off after two months - there simply was no "three of us". And the "documenting, improving, and adding features to BASIC" was not for Altair BASIC, it was for the underlying 6800 BASIC (especially, floating-point capabilities) that Allen and Gates were licensing simultaneously to Commodore, Radio Shack and Apple (as well as others) on fixed-price agreements for which they were being paid upfront. Can you say, "double-dipping?"

· "Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM, and DISK BASIC." None of this refers to the Altair BASIC that is presumably the topic of this letter. The last three products were developed under separate paid-up-front fixed-priced license agreements for Radio Shack TRS-80 (EXTENDED), the Commodore Pet (ROM), and Apple (DISK). In other words, Microsoft was being paid separately for all of these and had already been paid the fixed-priced license fee for Altair BASIC. (For your information, the Altair 8800 had no ROM BASIC capability, and didn't even have a disk drive.)

· "The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000."

This statement is nothing but pure gall and con artistry. Truthfully written, this statement should have read, "The value of the computer time Paul Allen and I misappropriated from fellow students at Harvard (and never paid for) in combination with the computer time we stole from American taxpayers was $40,000." And by the way, much of that time went to 6800 BASIC, which Microsoft was simultaneously licensing to Altair's competitors, not Altair BASIC.

· "The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive."

This single statement in and of itself completely undercuts any and all of Gate's subsequent whining and complaining later in this letter. What he is saying here is that those who received memory boards that worked and were able, therefore, to use Altair BASIC (to the point they were able to receive value from their money), were satisfied with it. And, from the sales numbers that were reported by Altair, those hobbyists paid for the software: "At the end of 1975, MITS was shipping a thousand computers a month, but BASIC was selling in the low hundreds.[18]" (in other words, the "hundreds of people" Gates quotes in this line were, in fact, paying for the Altair Basic they were using). Well, "Duh!", Billy. That's how it is supposed to work. So, we can safely assume that those who were able to actually get the software up and running and paid for it, as they rightfully should, and who didn't pay if they couldn't, again rightfully, were not the "thieves" and "parasites" that Gates and Altair labeled them?

· "Two surprising things are apparent, however."

Given the truths outlined relevant to the statement previous to this, nothing in the statements subsequent to it should be surprising.

· "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 of Altair Basic worth less than $2 an hour."

There are more lies and some really terrible math here. As the sales figures (reported above) clearly show, that small number of users who were able to get the memory boards bundled with Altair BASIC working did, in fact, pay for it (you cannot call anyone who wasn't able to get Altair BASIC to run as shipped because of known and admitted quality issues a "user", and you certainly can’t expect a non-user to pay for a broken product). And here's a news flash, Bill: you cannot expect users to pay a high price upfront to purchase product bundles that famously have high failure rates, especially when better products are available at a lower price and/or by other means. If Gates had genuinely thought that he had a case, the third product supplier and alternate source were well-known to hobbyists (and to him), and had he not known he'd be laughed out of court, he could have sued his imagined infringers (the legitimate vehicle of choice for non-bullies, or for those who are not overgrown spoiled brats having a hissy fit) to right these supposed wrongs.

But the math is (intentionally) laughable as well. Given we know that Gates and Allen defrauded taxpayers and fellow students to pay for most of the computer time that went into both 6800 BASIC and Altair BASIC, and that Allen and Gates never paid John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz[118] a cent for their intellectual property rights, and that the only other employee was a student and summer intern for two months, the primary expense item would have been Allen's and Gates' own personal time.

We also know that Allen and Gates were riding multiple horses at the same time - at the time the whiney Gates "Open Letter" was published, the two were developing 6800 BASIC versions for not only the Altair 8800, but also for the Apple II, Commodore Pet, and TRS-80, among others. We know those four companies paid at least $140,000 in upfront fixed-contract licensing fees to Microsoft. We also know that Paul Allen was being paid $30,000 a year in salary by MITS (Altair)[119] - which begs the question, did they know about the other BASIC licensees being supported by Allen and Gates on their dime? - and we know Gates was under a paid employment contract to MITS for roughly the same amount. We also know Gates and Allen got a $3,000 bonus at the signing of the Altair BASIC licensing agreement. Furthermore, we know several hundred users a month for roughly a year had in fact been paying for Altair BASIC at $395 a pop (later reduced to $200 in acknowledgment of the RAM memory board quality issues). Let's say 300 users a month for ten months at the lower $200 per month, which amounts to $600,000, of which Microsoft was to receive an average $45 in royalties per unit ($45 times 3,000 units sold is $135,000).

So, at the time the Gates "Open Letter" was written, Gates and Allen had pocketed (or would soon pocket) roughly $60,000 in salaries, $140,000 in fixed-price license fees, $135,000 in royalties, and a $3,000 bonus, totaling $338,000.

There were only the two of them working for the year and Gates was still a student at Harvard (we'll assume Davidoff's internship subsitutes for any of Gates' time lost due to studies).

At Gates' claimed "$2 an hour" return rate in this line of his "Open Letter", Allen and Gates would have had to work an incredible 69,000 hours to earn $338,000! Since there are only 2,000 standard working hours available per person in a year, obviously Gates is lying (or on some very, very, heavy drugs).

The more truthful hourly rate representing what Gates and Allen earned during this time with respect to Altair BASIC if, in fact, they had been spending all of their time on it as they promised (they weren't - they were actually working instead or collaterally on 6800 BASIC, which they were licensing to Altair's competitors) would have been $338,000 divided by 4,000 hours, or $84.50 per hour, an absolutely astronomical sum in 1976, when the minimum wage (not an unusual pay level for college students their age) was $2.10 per hour[120].

But you know from one fact, and one fact alone, that Gates is a damned liar. Gates has always been, throughout his entire life, nothing if not a greedy profiteer. Had he not been making plenty of money at it, you have to ask yourself: "Why did he continue doing it?" In a long career centered on all things computer-related, I have learned that the most reliable bellwether is not digital; it is instead human nature.

· "Why is this?"

This statement is a non-sequitur since nothing to this point "is" as Gates has stated it.

· "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software."

As noted above, most hobbyists, in fact, do not steal their software. Most do not pay for software/hardware bundles that do not work as was the case with the Altair 8800 memory/BASIC bundle, and will accept workarounds that do. If free software has been made available to a hobbyist that comes to them with no restrictions on its use, they may well use it, but that is a much different thing than the overt act of stealing.

· "Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share." If Gates' point here is that open-source software exists in abundance, and would be far and away the standard for hobbyists, then of course he is correct; but it de-fuses any point he might be trying to make, since, if that is the standard and he is in violation of it, he is the odd man out (reminiscent of the Ugly American, who goes into a non- English-speaking country condemning them as being the ones who are illiterate).

· "Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?"

Again, Gates is the only one here bringing to the land of hobbyists any expectation of getting paid. If he wants to change the paradigm of how hobbyists go about their craft, the onus is on him to demonstrate the value to them of changing a way of doing things that worked just fine until his mercenary behind showed up.

And Gates was certainly getting paid obscenely well at this pointing, earning $84.50 per hour against the hobbyists' $0.00 dollars per hour.

· "Is this fair?"

Given all of the above, no, but not in the direction Gates thinks. Gates should have been made to reveal his actual income, have been required to pay fair taxes on that, have been forced to pay John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz[121] royalties for their work, have been prohibited from working for competitors while billing Altair 8800 for their time, have been compelled to re-pay American taxpayers and their fellow students for the computer time Allen and Gates stole, and certainly should have been made to repay the PDP-10 time stolen seven years prior, with penalties and interest. But hey, life's not always fair, is it, Billy?

· "One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had."

This is a very childish and disingenuous way of try to spin the relationship between the failed memory boards Altair was shipping, and not wanting to pay for the Altair BASIC board/software bundles that required those boards to work correctly in order to run, so as to separate them. The two cannot be separated, are inextricably intertwined, and the user is absolutely right not to pay for both if one of the dependencies fails.

And potential future consumers are certainly within their rights to consider other options in the face of such blatant public failures.

· "The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape, and the overhead make it a break-even operation."

Now, this is truly a "who cares?" proposition. Bill Gates' inability to manage the hundreds of thousands of dollars he is receiving for his efforts in such a way he can make a profit is literally his own business affair, and of no interest whatsoever to the purchasers of his products (other than by extensions such as the answer to the question "can he stay in business long enough to honor his warranties?").

· "One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written." Do-do is definitely part of Gates' letter at this point. Nothing about the kind of money Bill Gates was putting into his pockets at this time would ever have discouraged anyone from writing software by any means, as all of his own subsequent behaviors abundantly prove. Indeed, all three of the open-source, hobbyist, and academic software development communities were thriving, bustling centers of energy and excitement, probably far more so than was commercial software development as he was writing this.

· "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"

What a manipulative way to fold a false assumption into the predicate for an argument! Nothing about Microsoft's 6800 BASIC software (before, then, or since) was even remotely professional, and the Altair BASIC couldn't even run on the memory boards it was being bundled with - what in the world could be construed as professional about that?!?

But if the discussion here were about someone else's work that was, in fact, professional, then the correct answer to the posited question would be, "Everyone and his brother!" (assuming "nothing" refers to receiving no actual cash on hand from the original receiver of the software).

Billions and billions of lines of code have been written worldwide as open source, or for experimentation, or for academic purposes, or for the public good, or by hobbyists for rewards other than cash money. As the penultimate poster child for money-grubbing fools, I wouldn't expect Bill Gates to know or understand how or why (it’s a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs[122] thing, and judging by Gates' rants in his letter, quite probably a forebrain[123] development thing), but these kinds of software very frequently exceed the quality of similar commercial software (I would argue the majority of the time), and sometimes by orders of magnitude.

· "What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"

Here we have a pack of blatant lies. The most Gates and Allen could possibly have contributed to the software was two man-years, there were and remained significant bugs in the program throughout its existence (though the fact the RAM boards the software needed to run were of such poor quality kept the fix priorities elsewhere), the documentation is generally regarded as mediocre at best[124], and, as noted previously, Gates and Allen had pocketed somewhere in the neighborhood of $338,000 dollars already for writing 6800 and Altair BASIC.

The question might be better phrased, "What person labeling himselfs a 'hobbyist' would have any reasonable expectation at all to unearned and undeserved profits, regardless the time-frame?"

· "The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software."

Narcissist much, Bill? This may well be the most absurd, out-of-touch and untrue statement made in this letter, certainly as it can be measured in concrete monetary terms. At the time Gates wrote this letter, commercial, open-source and hobbyist investment in hobby computing was exploding - the sheer number of emerging platforms was astonishing, and along with them, the software to support them. In addition to the Altair 8800, there were the IMSAI 8080, Atari, Galaksija, Micral, Apple I, Apple II. Commodore Pet, and TRS-80, in addition to dozens of hobbyists and small business machines built on Zilog Z-80 and Intel 8085 processors.[125]

· "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."

Again, an outright lie - Gates was even at the time licensing 6800 BASIC to a number of other platforms for profit (and in fact, may have thrown this line in expressly to keep Altair from learning about his activities with their competitors).

As history has shown, not wringing a few more bucks out of hobbyists (for memory card/BASIC bundles that did not work) had no impact whatsoever on Gates' motivations to make software available to anyone he wished.

· "Most directly, the thing you do is theft."

Again, nothing Gates has said anywhere in his letter when compared to the boots-on-the-ground facts supports any concept of theft other than his own (that of computer time for which he has never paid).

Gee - and I missed that secret "genius"-level course Gates obviously took at Harvard (which none of the rest of us ever heard about) that says accusing an entire general audience of theft in an open letter using personal pronouns is ever effective at accomplishing the goals the writer has set for himself.

· "What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software?"

So, the bullying narcissist is now saying what, "if I falsely claim I am not making any money, then by extension no one else can make any money"? Or is he trying to rationalize making money off hobbyists as being OK because others are doing it, which is a moot point since he's putting something like $84.50 per hour into his own pocket (while apparently being so ashamed of the fact that he has to lie about it)?

Surely this isn’t the five-year-old's tattle-tale argument to his mother, "Well, I saw Bobby doing it, so why can’t I do it?". Oh, Billy, please don't tell me you are stooping to that (dude has some issues…)

· "Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end."

Oooooh, a less-than-subtle threat, but odd to be coming from a guy who was a known thief and liar. Taking a moral stance is more impactful if you have morals.

· "They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at."

Wait, the greedy profiteer who has never been a hobbyist in his life (even on the PDP-10 at age 13 in summer camp, he hacked stolen computer time, which is not what "hobbyists" do) now leverages money-grubbing as the stance from which to tell true hobbyists how to run their own club? Seriously? I guess that goes to show bullying, narcissism, and greed do not a decent combination make.

· "I would appreciate letters from anyone who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment."

Actually, a few thousand people have written Bill Gates letters telling him exactly where to shove it (hey, it's a very precise small hole, there shouldn’t be any confusion about the matter), and he didn’t seem to appreciate those letters at all. I am assuming the fact he can sit down in a chair today without wincing means he did not act on any of the comments or suggestions.

· "Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108."

We have, Bill, we have. So disappointed you haven't responded.

· "Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software."

Again, this may come as bad news, Billy, but what pleases you isn’t relevant here. You should have plenty of reason to be pleased receiving $84.50 per hour against a $2.10/hour minimum wage in 1976, but as a churlish, spoiled brat you have instead chosen to focus on twisting a knife against those who aren't at fault in order to extract blood from a turnip on a farm where you are a trespasser. I am sorry if you are frustrated, but I cannot imagine anyone more deserving at this point of that (and a good, old-fashioned spanking). For all your lies, revisionist history, and crocodile tears, you have then ($338,000 would have covered paid the salaries of ten good programmers in 1976), and for more than thirty-four years hence, been afforded every conceivable opportunity to hire as many good coders as you could ever possibly want, with billions and billions of dollars in resources.

But nothing in your letter has any bearing at all upon the fact that despite all those opportunities and resources, you have, in the name of greed, stubbornly and consistently refused to produce any software that could ever be described as excellent.

Every single company I know of, except yours, has a Skunk Works or prototype department periodically capable of producing stunning examples of excellence. This is true even of those hallmarks of mediocrity, American automobile manufacturers like Ford and GM.

But not Microsoft. However, I will give you this, Billy - you certainly deluged the market, albeit with pure crap.

And I assure you, as history has long since shown, the unwillingness of hobbyists back in 1976 to pay for memory cards and BASIC bundles that did not function, and opting instead for other alternatives, had nothing to do with any of that.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Inc. 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