Even his first product, Micro Soft BASIC was stolen. Gates found the listing on a paper tape discarded in a dumpster outside the university computer dept. He and Allen stole computer time, very expensive in the '70s, to cross-compile it into Intel 8080 machine code to sell it to the nascent hobbyist market. With a complete lack of self-awareness, Gates went into a rage and published an intemperate screed against software piracy when he discovered that the hobbyists were sharing his stolen BASIC freely amongst themselves.