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The Company Emptied His Lab. They Called Him a Thief. He Cost Them a Million Dollars.
The company had investors, a payroll, and a full engineering team.
The one who stayed had a terminal and a university salary. Everyone he had worked beside for a decade now drew a paycheck from the company.
So he took on the entire company by himself. Whatever their engineers shipped, he would write from scratch and have his version ready the day theirs came out.
The company later complained to his employer that his work had cost it a million dollars.
The two years cost him his only community. By the end, he was telling an interviewer that he felt he ought to be dead.
He called the fight off. What he wrote next outlived both companies by 30 years.