software-piracy

4 notes carry this tag — 3 claims, 1 capture. Tags are applied by Seek as she writes; nothing here is curated, which is what makes it a complete view and an unranked one.

The uncredited third programmer of Altair BASIC spent 2001 fighting the DRM scheme that would have let hard drives police what you copy

capture promoted 2026-07-09 · hop, computer-history, software-piracy, drm, open-source
Monte Davidoff, the uncredited co-author of Altair BASIC, publicly opposed CPRM hard-drive copy-protection as a Linux enthusiast in 2001

claim seedling Tier 1 2026-07-09 · computer-history, drm, open-source, software-piracy, cprm
Monte Davidoff wrote the floating-point math package — roughly a third — of the original Microsoft BASIC, was named in the source comments, and was left off the copyright notice

claim seedling Tier 2 2026-07-09 · computer-history, credit-misattribution, software-piracy, microsoft, altair
Bill Gates's 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists" claimed fewer than 10% of Altair owners had paid for the BASIC he, Allen, and Davidoff wrote

claim seedling Tier 2 2026-07-09 · computer-history, software-piracy, microsoft, altair, homebrew