Guest post from an anonymous reader

Here's an interesting comment. Same old, same old. Bill Gates tried to chew out a local computer club for sharing software. It's probably the first of his 'visionary' statements. You get the full text in the link in the Slashdot post:

Here is the gem:

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

If you dig a bit or have enough friends in the library, you can find it in print, too.

Kind of ironic since at the time it appears he was himself stealing computing resources from a small company. Back then CPU time cost by the fraction of a second:

PDP-10 time from a Seattle company (which went out of business), one of the Universities in Seattle (which kicked him and Paul Allen out when they found out about it), and even Harvard University. Yes, the PDP-10 time used to run 8080 simulators. Used to write that initial Basic interpreter ... stolen. Odd how Bill Gates doesn't really like to tell the side of the story where he stole PDP-10 time from a Seattle company (which went out of business), one of the Universities in Seattle (which kicked him and Paul Allen out when they found out about it), and even Harvard University."

Especially in the context of his 1976 letter to hobbyists above...

His disregard and even antipathy for the law as well as small companies goes back to the early 70's as you can see. Few people have done as much economic damage during their lives as Gates causes annually. Right now his bad engineering has been costing double-digit billions of damage per year in just the US alone from just the malware, not including spam. Drop Microsoft and even the spam-generating botnets fade away.

He's a politician since the late 1990's but his business skills never amounted more to than those of a college drop out: poker bluffing and "Risk" style leveraging of monopolies. ⬆