You could say his career began as a dumpster diver

[Jared]

This tidbit came up in conversation at the KCLUG meeting
last night; I misquoted it, so here is more accurate info.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/11671.html

Bill Gates' roots in the trashcans of history
By: Graham Lea
Posted: 29/06/2000 at 13:02 GMT

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).

The occasion was when Gates picked up the Price Waterhouse Leadership 
Award for Lifetime Achievement. Video History interviewer David Allison 
asked Gates about the early days when he was still at school, but 
working part-time for the Computer Center Corporation (C-cubed) in Seattle.

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. ®

--------------

-Jared

p.s.I will say that I'm an experienced dumpster diver, and am
presently  wearing a funky wool sweater, handmade in Peru,
which someone cast away a few years ago and I retrieved, so
I'm _not_ saying anything bad about dumpster diving.