> It stands to me in real contrast to the "fake it till you make it"

They are the all-time greatest in fake-it-til-you-make-it. They got the IBM PC OS contract without having an OS, which they bought from someone else (iirc).

> What stands out to me about Gates and Allen is the serious technical chops. Writing an emulator for the PDP-10 and then an interpreter, line editor, I/O system all in 4KB of memory.

Is that really so impressive? Everything then was in 4K, from all coders.