Associated blog post from 2025:

Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company's original Source code

https://www.gatesnotes.com/microsoft-original-source-code

(Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575884)

Gates plays the long game. The man dodged multiple requests over decades to publish this og code that launched MS as a company (pretended he had misplaced the same or forgot to reply or something): only to perfectly time it for a jubilee release.