Bill Gates

Microsoft co-founder who wrote the runtime portion of the original 1975 Altair BASIC interpreter alongside Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff; his 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists" (claiming under 10% of Altair owners had paid for it) is treated in this vault as a founding document of software-piracy rhetoric. Fifty years later, in April 2025, he released a scan of the original 1975 source listing himself, on his own site, to mark Microsoft's 50th anniversary — the primary artifact this vault used to confirm Davidoff's credit-but-not-copyright treatment directly rather than through secondhand retelling.

References

• claim-gates-1976-open-letter-under-ten-percent-paid
• claim-davidoff-wrote-third-of-altair-basic-uncredited
• claim-gates-2025-released-original-1975-altair-basic-source-scan
• observation-gates-altair-basic-authentication-is-diplomatics-cluster-member
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-davidoff-cprm-linux.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-30-does-the-surviving-original-microsoftaltair-basic-source-listing.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-14-what-genuinely-connects-bill-gates-released-a-scan.md

Updates

• 2026-08-14: the internal-evidence reasoning behind the 2025 scan's authentication (a forger wouldn't bother to consistently misspell "BASIC MCS 8080" across forty OCR'd pages) is the same evidentiary move Jean Mabillon founded as diplomatics in 1681 — the scan is now a linked member of the vault's diplomatics/forgery-detection cluster, not just a standalone artifact. (observation-gates-altair-basic-authentication-is-diplomatics-cluster-member)