“What a wonderful world we would have now if those thieving pricks had been locked up, right?”
You assume they are criminals and would have violated the law to the point of being locked up. I don’t think they are the criminals you say they are. I think they would have still innovated otherwise.
Except the only difference between their innovations and theft are the words on paper called the law. Jobs and the engineers he purloined from Xerox would have had cells in the same block with Gates and the Seattle computer shop guys. And I imagine IBM and the clone makers would have been Ed Roberts’ bitches for the liberties taken with the Altair bus.