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.

Americans like to tell the story of the early microcomputer industry in Silicon Valley as a history of invention. At its most facile, this manifests itself in stories of individual iconic businessman geniuses: David Packard, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, Steves Jobs and Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Even if they may not have been the best engineers or programmers in the region—only a couple of them were even in that conversation—they were visionaries who saw the future in advance. The true path of invention is rarely clean or simple, but when scientific credit fails to align with net worth, the second trumps the first in public memory. After all, crediting inventors is notoriously difficult; every innovation building on the last, every inventor inextricably embedded in a series of communities. Two or more often alight on the same idea at the same time. Money provides a sort of scoreboard, an equivalent by which we can compare the otherwise incomparable. Steve Jobs goes on the THINK DIFFERENT poster, just as Leland Stanford stars in the Southern Pacific’s celebratory painting. Judah and Wozniak go down in history as the brains behind their operations, and the workers who built the tracks and assembled the chips are background figures at best.

Like a not inconsiderable number of other people, Bill Gates was in the right place at the right time to write an operating system for the first generation of personal computers. That he did not write one of them isn’t surprising, since a lot of other people didn’t, either. What distinguishes Gates is that, unlike everyone else, he came to own the legal rights to PC-DOS. Why him, and how? The “Open Letter to Hobbyists” helps explain. It’s a landmark assertion of property rights within the community: It attempts to draw a thick line between the hobbyist era and the microcomputer industry, and it’s characteristic of the way Gates made his billions with Microsoft. The Homebrew pirates saw computer science as essentially a public domain, and in the 1970s, in a descriptive sense, they were right. Public dollars paid for almost all the computing power in the country, even when the computers were technically privately owned. The hackers could point to Gates’s use of the ARPA PDP at Harvard not only because they had experience pulling the same con, using official processors after hours for personal projects, but also because there were only so many computers he could have used to write the BASIC interpreter. They all learned to code on publicly financed Big Science machines, whether at universities, at commercial defense contractors, or in the military itself. With a draft on, where exactly individuals fit in this complex wasn’t usually up to them anyway. The knowledge products of that work, like BASIC, belonged to the people. It was acceptable to use the knowledge to make products and sell them—hobbyists were always first in line to buy, too—but to fence off an important set of instructions and start charging monopoly rents for them was an audacious move. [...]

Unheard-of sums flowed through these men; what did Gates and Jobs represent to the money they attracted? The Xerox PARC visit infused Apple’s Mac with years of prized research and development, and they didn’t do it because they liked the boss—Jobs literally stunk up the place—or even for the opportunity to invest. Contracting with Apple was a way to solve the problem of the company’s labor costs, secured by the firm’s workers during the previous decades, when big business, big government, and big labor collaborated to split the proceeds of racing growth. Apple combined great branding with the worst of Silicon Valley’s labor practices. Journalist Michael Malone, fellow son of the Bay Area space settlers, described the hypocrisy: “While the company propaganda stressed its community, its democracy, its adherence to the ideals of the Howdy Doody generation, each day an unmarked car picked up blank boards and boxes of chips from Apple’s back door and delivered them to a roomful of Filipino women and housewives in a Saratoga home, who watched soap operas and stuffed boards at piece rates.”42 That network is what really made Apple a desirable partner.