As Malcolm Gladwell has recently highlighted: Of course Gates' family wealth helped him become a better hacker. That's how he got all that computing experience in high school. Before the invention of the microcomputer, far fewer high school students had access to computers. (I'm younger than Gates, but I do remember computer scarcity: I was among the last generation to experience it. In middle school, having gotten bored with BASIC, I taught myself Pascal from books, but I didn't get ahold of a compiler until three years later.)
But Microsoft's early success in dominating the microcomputer language market was not built on "exclusivity agreements" -- it was built on Gates and Allen's software skills, which allowed them to hit the microcomputer market early (before the Altair even shipped, in fact!) and then to hold their market position by porting their products to a lot of different systems as they came out. And if Microsoft hadn't cornered the language market on a range of early microcomputer systems, there would have been no reason for IBM to approach Bill Gates with that fateful agreement that brought the company into the OS business.
I recall it all too well, and it seriously damaged my development. I mastered BASIC during the Commodore Christmas of 85. Years later in 11th grade, my high school was teaching...BASIC...on Trash-80s. I thought for a while, what is the fuss about computers for? They haven't moved forward in years and speak a crap language. I'm done with these toys.
But Microsoft's early success in dominating the microcomputer language market was not built on "exclusivity agreements" -- it was built on Gates and Allen's software skills, which allowed them to hit the microcomputer market early (before the Altair even shipped, in fact!) and then to hold their market position by porting their products to a lot of different systems as they came out. And if Microsoft hadn't cornered the language market on a range of early microcomputer systems, there would have been no reason for IBM to approach Bill Gates with that fateful agreement that brought the company into the OS business.