It is interesting to note the high moral tone being taken by Microsoft in its castigation of Oracle's legal if somewhat dodgy intelligence gathering activities.* But surely Microsoft hasn't forgotten that Bill Gates himself, together with Paul Allen, has also used trash cans as a primary source of intelligence?

Gates even admitted this in an interview recorded in 1993 which was deposited in the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution (which coincidentally is a short walk from Judge Jackson's Court).

Gates said: "I'd skip out on athletics and go down to this computer center. We were moving ahead very rapidly: Basic, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those."

The listings evidently included Basic for the PDP-10, but it was Allen who did the Assembler programming to simulate the Altair, while Gates, Monte Davidoff and later Allen worked on a Basic interpreter for the machine. Of course neither C-cubed nor DEC received any consideration for the use of the code filched from the waste bin. Some people might consider this disregard for the intellectual property rights in a rather different light from the young pioneers. ®

* In the interest of balance we wish to point out that Larry Ellison is a crazed megalomaniac. As well. - Ed

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