It has been 40 years since Bill Gates wrote his
open letter
to the software industry complaining that computer hobbyists were
stealing his BASIC program. That was so long ago that Wikipedia has a
picture of the source code for "Micro-Soft" BASIC on paper tape. A lot
of things have changed since then.
In the 1970s when Microsoft was getting started, it was common for
people to copy, swap or donate software simply because they could.
Especially in the hobbyist community such as the Homebrew Computer Club,
people bought hardware and they got software in any way possible. It
was easy because there was no security on the distribution media, and
there were so few devices that could read the media it really didn't
matter.
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