Uhm...no. The DEC computer they used when developing Altair BASIC was a PDP-10. DEC BASIC and Altair BASIC were both written in assembly language. The differences in architecture and memory constraints between a PDP-10 and an 8080 are too great for it to be feasible to steal code. At best you could use the PDP-10 code to learn some algorithms and then write your own versions for the 8080.
What people saying it was stolen from DEC are probably doing is getting confused over Gates and Allen's use of an 8080 emulator they had written earlier for PDP-10. When they decided to do an Altair BASIC they modified their 8080 emulator to be an Altair emulator and did all the testing and debugging of their 8080 BASIC on that since they did not have access to an actual Altair 8080.
That PDP-10 was owned by Harvard, and there was some question over whether or not using it for a commercial project like that was something students were allowed to do using their free accounts.
So if I take someone else's assembly code and port it to a new architecture then that's not a derivative work? Interesting stance!
>> That's why Microsoft is not an innovative company.
You may not like the company, but it is definitely an innovative company. They may not innovate on the things you are drawn to, but they definitely innovate. A lot too.
They certainly innovated world leading business strategies like "embrace, extend and extinguish".
As far as technical ideas and innovation are regarded, I have not seen a single instance of something they built which was not a copy or an extension of something which had been seen before.
If you have an idea that is so new, so unique, so different and unprecedented that no one else has ever had a similar idea or done something remotely similar, there's almost certainly something profoundly wrong with it.
> If you have an idea that is so new, so unique, so different and unprecedented...
Telephone, television etc. were pretty unique. Even the iPhone is so different from what came before it that it is truly innovative. Even people who know Apple is working on a phone, and expected something awesome, were blown away when the product was finally revealed. That's innovation.
Wow, what a question! Some would argue that all he did was steal! Is there anything Microsoft did that was not stolen from somewhere else? Starting with the Basic interpreter that got Gates started. That was stolen from DEC. Isn't .NET and C# a copy of Java? It may or may not be theft in a legal sense, but morally it certainly is!
Microsoft's software development process is program-manager driven. That means even when they hire smart developers, they don't give the developers a free rein. Instead PMs decide what you will do. And where do PMs get ideas? By looking at competitors' products. That's why Microsoft is not an innovative company.