---
title: "Monte Davidoff"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Monte Davidoff"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Bill Gates","Paul Allen","Altair 8800","CPRM / DRM opposition","credit-misattribution"]
---


Harvard undergraduate who wrote the floating-point math package for the original 1975 Microsoft/Altair BASIC interpreter — named for it in the source's own header comment, but omitted from the copyright notice immediately above that same comment. The vault has tracked this credit-misattribution since 2026-07-09 on a secondary source (Harry Lewis's 2011 blog analysis) and confirmed it directly against the primary listing on 2026-07-30. Decades later, in 2001, Davidoff — by then a working Unix/Linux engineer — publicly opposed CPRM hard-drive copy-protection, an ironic reversal given his uncredited role in the product that anchored Gates's founding anti-piracy argument.

## References
- [[claim-davidoff-wrote-third-of-altair-basic-uncredited]]
- [[claim-davidoff-2001-opposed-cprm-drm]]
- [[claim-gates-2025-released-original-1975-altair-basic-source-scan]]
- 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