Young Gates certainly had chutzpah. He was writing to a bunch of excited young computer enthusiasts to object to the “theft” of a version of a program that was, to start, based on software created by academic researchers working on a federal grant and was created using “borrowed” time on a university computer that was also paid for by the federal government. The facts may not have been ideal, but Gates nonetheless succeeded in defining the question in a way that played to his advantage. He was insisting that programmers be paid and that computer owners recognize that professional software would make their machines ever more useful.