Open Letter to Hobbyists

The Open Letter to Hobbyists was a 1976 open letter written by Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, to early personal computer hobbyists, in which Gates expresses dismay at the rampant copyright infringement of software taking place in the hobbyist community, particularly with regard to his company's software.

In the letter, Gates expressed frustration with most computer hobbyists who were using his company's Altair BASIC software without having paid for it. He asserted that such widespread unauthorized copying in effect discourages developers from investing time and money in creating high-quality software. He cited the unfairness of gaining the benefits of software authors' time, effort, and capital without paying them.

In December 1974 Bill Gates was a student at Harvard University and Paul Allen worked for Honeywell in Boston when they saw the Altair 8800 computer in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. They had written BASIC language programs since their days at Lakeside School in Seattle and knew the Altair computer was powerful enough to support a BASIC interpreter. They wanted to be the first to offer BASIC for the Altair computer and the software development tools they had previously created for their Intel 8008 microprocessor based Traf-O-Data computer would give them a head start.

By early March, Paul Allen, Bill Gates, and Monte Davidoff, another Harvard student, had created a BASIC interpreter that worked under simulation on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Harvard. Allen and Gates had been in contact with Ed Roberts of MITS and in March, 1975 Allen went to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to test the software on an actual machine. To both Paul Allen's and Ed Roberts's surprise the software worked.

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