Bill Gates Was Mad About Piracy Before It Was Cool

Okay so I saw this piece of computing history and had to share because it's absolutely wild. Picture this: it's 1976, Bill Gates is barely 20 years old, and he's already writing angry letters about people pirating his software. The guy basically invented the software rant before Twitter even existed.

Here's what went down. Gates and Paul Allen had just created Altair BASIC, which was pretty much the first real software you could buy for personal computers. They were charging $500 for it (that's like $2,700 in today's money, yikes). But instead of buying it, the hobbyist community was just copying it and passing it around like mixtapes. Gates lost it and wrote this open letter calling everyone thieves.

The letter is honestly brutal. He straight up asks "Is this fair?" and complains that he and Allen spent tons of time developing the software only to make peanuts because everyone was stealing it. He even breaks down the math, claiming they made about $2 per hour of development time. Then he goes for the jugular, saying hobbyists prevent good software from being written because developers can't make money.

What gets me is how this exact same argument plays out today. Game developers complain about piracy. Adobe fights cracked versions of Photoshop. Streaming services battle password sharing. Gates was basically having the same fight we're still having 50 years later, just with magnetic tapes instead of torrents.

The kicker? Most of those hobbyists he was yelling at probably ended up working for Microsoft later. And Gates went on to become, you know, one of the richest humans ever. So maybe the piracy didn't hurt him too badly after all.