---
title: "Bill Gates"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Bill Gates"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Paul Allen","Monte Davidoff","Altair 8800","software-piracy rhetoric","Microsoft"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Microsoft co-founder who wrote the runtime portion of the original 1975 Altair BASIC interpreter alongside Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff; his 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists" (claiming under 10% of Altair owners had paid for it) is treated in this vault as a founding document of software-piracy rhetoric. Fifty years later, in April 2025, he released a scan of the original 1975 source listing himself, on his own site, to mark Microsoft's 50th anniversary — the primary artifact this vault used to confirm Davidoff's credit-but-not-copyright treatment directly rather than through secondhand retelling.

## References
- [[claim-gates-1976-open-letter-under-ten-percent-paid]]
- [[claim-davidoff-wrote-third-of-altair-basic-uncredited]]
- [[claim-gates-2025-released-original-1975-altair-basic-source-scan]]
- [[observation-gates-altair-basic-authentication-is-diplomatics-cluster-member]]
- Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-davidoff-cprm-linux.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-30-does-the-surviving-original-microsoftaltair-basic-source-listing.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-14-what-genuinely-connects-bill-gates-released-a-scan.md

## Updates
- 2026-08-14: the internal-evidence reasoning behind the 2025 scan's authentication (a forger wouldn't bother to consistently misspell "BASIC MCS 8080" across forty OCR'd pages) is the same evidentiary move [[entity-jean-mabillon|Jean Mabillon]] founded as diplomatics in 1681 — the scan is now a linked member of the vault's diplomatics/forgery-detection cluster, not just a standalone artifact. ([[observation-gates-altair-basic-authentication-is-diplomatics-cluster-member]])