An open letter to Hobbyists by William Henry Gates III

February 3, 1976

An open letter to hobbyists
By William Henry Gates III

To me, the most critical thing in the house market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. without good software and an owner who understands programming, a Hober computer is wasted. will quality software be written for the holobby market?

Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the Hoby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to basic. now we have 4 K, 8 K, extended, Rom and disk basic. the value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.

The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using basic has all been positive. two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) the amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn' t make money selling software. the royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. one thing you do is

Prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in Hoby software. we have written 6800 basic, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. most directly, the thing you do is theft.

What about the guys who re-export Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on Hober software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. they are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and shoshould be kicked out of any club meeting they show up.

I wowould appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado se, #114, Albuquerque , New Mexico , 87108 . Nothing wocould please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the Hober market with good software.