The IBM PC was a departure point for the home computer’s intellectual property regime, raising and answering questions in equal measure. By effectively waving away IP claims on the market’s hottest commodity, Big Blue made room for some of its contractors to pursue their own. Two of these contractors in particular hitched their chariots to the winged horses Copyright and Trademark, escaping the gravitational pull of linear growth and launching into the sky, surpassing even IBM itself. More than the commercial tower PC’s successful originators at IBM, Microsoft and Intel came to define the product. As of this writing, Intel’s market cap is almost twice IBM’s, while Microsoft holds an unseemly advantage that nears 20–1. IBM’s choice to create an IP-less PC was smart from the perspective of development speed, and it made the giant untouchable to antitrust authorities. But the real money from the PC boom went to firms that used the law’s protections to secure monopoly superprofits.ix That’s how Bill Gates became, for a time, the world’s richest man.