[Knitebane]

Gates contracted with IBM to manufacture his product.

He did so by selling a product which he did not yet have. He then approached several operating system designers. One of them sold him Quick and Dirty Operating System, which Bill renamed MSDOS.

He got the money from two places. One was his daddy, an Intellectual Property lawyer and also from sales of his BASIC compiler, which he got by stealing the work of others.

There are a couple of sad points to this. One, he was turned down by the creator of CP/M, which was a pretty good operating system compared to the kludge which was QDOS. Second, he wasn't tossed in jail for his antics. People who get away with crimes like theft and fraud generally go on to perpetuate larger thefts and frauds.

[DB]

"People who get away with crimes like theft and fraud generally go on to perpetuate larger thefts and frauds."

A.K.A Marketing...

[JoeSixPack1]

I had my fill of Bill Gates after he purposely set out to, and did, destroy Stack Industries.

First he stole their architecture for compression. Then he took them to court for using what he then claimed was his. Then he lost his court case but came away with a court order to share technology, research and buy stock in Stack.

So he shut down his R&D of compression algorithms so he wouldn't have to share.
He used his court ordered stock purchase for a hostile take over.
He tap danced until the courts orders were fulfilled and Stack Industries was dead.
Then he bloated his programs and started stealing disk impression architecture to expand capacity.

Gates is a piece of work like no other.

[whd23]

He got the money from two places. One was his daddy, an Intellectual Property lawyer and also from sales of his BASIC compiler, which he got by stealing the work of others.

Hey, I'm no Gates fan but how do you figure he "stole" the work of others by writing a BASIC interpreter for the Altair? At best, I think you could argue that they misappropriated Harvard's computer time running their 8080 simulator.