Of course, he left out the fact that the $40,000.00 USD worth of computer time was stolen from a US government owned computer on loan to one of his professors. He didn't actually PAY $40k USD or even raise funds to cover the equivalent value of the stolen computer time. Gates is a thief, and this was just his first big heist. I was always of the opinion that he US government should have gotten a cut of MS BASIC since it couldn't have been built without the modified emulator handling the ALTAIR 8080 assembly instructions.