My industry brother tells me that the original piece of internet software was developed and owned by a little Chicago company known as early as '87 or '88 as "Internet Explorer." It was a good product and the name had been originally and duly registered by this mom and pop size outfit.
When it came time for Microsoft to crank its attention, its hoary siege cannon in that little company's direction, Gates decided he liked the name almost as much as he hated the useability and high quality of the little company's sole product -- which was designed as a browser first and a massive venue for advertising second.
So, in the style of the good old robber barons, (who, like Gates always traveled with bodyguards, for obvious reasons) Gates simply decided to call his new browser, get ready, "Internet Explorer," what else? He's Bill Gates, he gets to do this kind of thing.
When this small company had finally finished trying to defend itself from the life crushing and business ruining bohemoth by bringing suit in court, after some four or five years appeals, counter appeals, counter double-whammy counter suits, etc. etc., they discovered that they had, after legal fees and the confusion of Gates grabbing the market by using their name, more massive counter-suits by Gates, etc. --these guys discovered they had exactly enough money left over to pay a small severance package to their forty or so employees and turn out the lights. And of course turn out the lights on their now re-mortgaged and re-possessed homes, etc.
If Gates really were a hard-charging, brilliant young whiz-kid entrepreneur, as his hugely expensive self-imaging job has claimed over the years, he would have been too busy designing and building a better browser using its own, and not another guy's, name. But that's not how he operates.
His first step was typical of how he proceeded afterward, he sold DOS before he owned it himself. He did not write the language, he simply gave it a name.
The guy is really really smart, in the same way that a virus is really smart. It tricks the body's own cells into replecating not themselves, but the virus. He's a genius.
And if I were to find out that he is a member of the Church of Scientology, I would not be surprised.
Now THAT would be a wonderful and entertaining face-off. Gates vs. the "Church" of Scientology. Battle of the Reptiles or what?
Have a nice Libertarian Dream of a day, everybody...
BUMPITTY-BUMP
Wow, what a great story. Of course, there's a major plot hole here - Tim Berners-Lee didn't start working on the WWW until about 1989, and the HTML/WWW spec wasn't made publicly available to anyone outside of CERN until the summer of 1991. So whatever the hell this anonymous company did, it sure wasn't a web browser.
But, despite that, I still know what you're talking about. And if you'd like to get the story right, you can look up the Synet case, and come to a conclusion based on something resembling facts, rather than secondhand bashing...