Editing An Open Letter to Hobbyists (section)

== Open letter ==
[[File:Bill Gates Letter to Hobbyists ocr.pdf|400px|thumb|alt=A scan of an A4 typewritten letter, dated February 3, 1976, and signed by Bill Gates (as "General Partner, Micro-Soft"). It is titled "An Open Letter to Hobbyists".|Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter Volume 2, Issue 1, January 31, 1976]]
At the end of 1975, MITS was shipping a thousand computers a month, but copies of BASIC were selling in the low hundreds.<ref>Manes (1994), 90.</ref> Additional software projects{{vague|By Gates and Allen? By MITS?|date=January 2021}} required more resources; the MITS 8-inch floppy disk system was about to be released, as was the MITS 680B computer based on the [[Motorola 6800]]. A high school friend of Allen and Gates, [[Ric Weiland]], was hired to convert the 8080 BASIC to the 6800 microprocessor. [[David Bunnell]], ''Computer Notes'' Editor, was sympathetic to Gates' position. He wrote in the September 1975 issue that "customers have been ripping off MITS software".

<blockquote>Now I ask you--does a musician have the right to collect the royalty on the sale of his records or does a writer have the right to collect the royalty on the sale of his books? Are people who copy software any different than those who copy records and books?<ref name="Computer Notes - Bunnell">{{cite journal|title=Across the Editor's Desk |journal=Computer Notes |last=Bunnell |first=David |volume=1 |issue=4 |page=2 |publisher=MITS |location=Albuquerque NM. |date=September 1975 |url=http://startup.nmnaturalhistory.org/gallery/notesViewer.php?ii=75_9&p=2 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120323162008/http://startup.nmnaturalhistory.org/gallery/notesViewer.php?ii=75_9&p=2 |archive-date=March 23, 2012 }}</ref> </blockquote>

Gates, keen to attempt to explain the cost of developing software to the hobbyist community, restated much of what Bunnell had written in September and what Roberts had written in October; however, the tone of his letter was different, instead emphasising Gates' view that hobbyists were stealing from him personally, and not from a corporation.

<blockquote>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?</blockquote>

One of the principal targets of the letter was the Homebrew Computer Club, with a copy sent to the club directly. The letter also appeared in ''Computer Notes''. To ensure the letter would be noticed, Bunnell sent the letter via special delivery mail to every major computer publication in the country.<ref>Manes (1994), 91.</ref>

In the letter, Gates also mentioned the development of the [[APL (programming language)|APL programming language]] for the 8080 and 6800 microprocessors, a programming language in vogue with some other computer scientists in the 1970s. The language, which used a character set based on the [[Greek alphabet]], required special terminals to implement that most hobbyist terminals did not have; as well as not displaying symbols from the Greek alphabet, most hobbyist terminals did not even display lowercase letters. Though Gates was enamored with APL, Allen did not believe it could be sold as a product; interest in the project soon faded, and the software itself was never completed.<ref>Manes (1994), 97–98.</ref>