digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those.

A lot of us did the same thing in that era. It's surprising how much information can be learned from what others think is useless.

Thank you SUNY New Paltz and the IBM submarine facility (no idea what it was called) for not securing your Dumpsters. It's how I learned computing before it was taught in schools.

Back in those days, software was just an accessory to hardware, not something that was valuable and could be sold by itself. So they would not have thought to secure their dumpsters.

Bill Gates played a significant role in jumpstarting the commercial software industry, especially with his "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" in 1976, which urged people to pay for software.