Chapter Five
Lakeside
The first thing that struck my seventh-grader sensibilities about Lakeside School was that it was misnamed. The place was nowhere near a lake. It was set in the woods, just off Interstate 5 on the northern edge of Seattle, a twenty-minute drive from my neighborhood. As I rode there in my mom’s Ford station wagon on that first day, it seemed like a long way from home.
Lakeside was founded in 1919 as a college feeder for boys from some of Seattle’s wealthier families. Originally it was on Lake Washington—hence the name—but in the 1930s it moved to land cleared to build a larger college-like campus. In the six years I would spend there, the school would shed the last of its more conservative prep school traditions, abolish its dress code, hire women faculty, and merge with a girls’ school—but when I started in the fall of 1967, every teacher was male, except the librarian, and white. We had assigned seating at lunch. While at the school I would fall in love with the adolescent staples The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, books that depict iconic East Coast prep schools. Lakeside was modeled after those places, complete with clipped green lawns and columned brick buildings. It even had a bell tower.
The school was split between grades seven and eight in the lower school and ninth through twelfth in the upper school. There wasn’t much mixing. We lower-school students spent most of the day in Moore Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus, while the upperclassman had freedom to wander, and they unquestionably ruled the place. Sports were a big deal, bad news for me, I thought. The football team had had a long winning streak and the rowing team had brought Lakeside fame by beating a better-known East Coast school in a national championship.
My class had about fifty boys in it, nearly all of them white. Their fathers had the types of jobs you’d expect at a private school in the Pacific Northwest back then. They were lawyers, doctors, bankers, forestry product executives, Boeing engineers—members of Seattle’s elite. One dad had started a steak restaurant that would become a national chain. Another would start a major health insurance company. We weren’t a diverse mix by any stretch, yet I still felt different from a lot of the other kids. Many seemed so sure of themselves, especially those with older siblings at Lakeside, who already seemed to know the ropes. In those first few weeks I watched as others quickly found their place, signing up for football, the newspaper, drama, glee club, or various other activities. Unlike me, many arrived with social networks. They knew each other from the ski club or tennis club or through family connections.
Lost in this new place, I fell back into my well-practiced shtick playing the goof-off. That worked well in my old school, so I figured I’d keep up the act. One of the highest honors you could earn at Lakeside was a Gold Star, a medal given to students who excelled in the “five points” of the star—athletics, scholarship, fellowship, character, and effort. In my first two years, there was no chance anyone would mistake me for that breed.
I’ve read depictions of me at Lakeside during that time. I was called a loner, a nerd, a bit obnoxious. I was probably all of those things. With the distance of years and perspective of age, I see how hard I was searching for an identity. All the progress I thought I had made at my old school was meaningless here. I was a nonathlete in a school known for sports. In a place where people were focused, I was an avid generalist. I didn’t fit in, and I didn’t know how to fix that. So I pretended that I didn’t want to.
My act fell flat almost immediately.
Seventh-grade geography was taught by Mr. Anderson, the head of athletics, who was mostly known for coaching Lakeside’s football team through its winning streak. He looked every bit the part, with square jaw and crew cut and a football on his desk. At times he ran his class like we were on the field. Get a bad quiz grade and you might have to drop and do ten push-ups. Give a wrong answer and he might pump-fake throwing his football at you. Although I liked geography and maps and knew at some level that Mr. Anderson was a good guy, I messed around in class, skipped assignments, barely participated, and did my share of push-ups.
I was wholly self-satisfied playing the clown until it came time to work on a group project. Mr. Anderson put the best students together and paired me with the kid that everyone knew had the worst grade in the class. Through that simple action, I suddenly saw myself through a teacher’s eyes: Gates isn’t smart. This stung.
My one attempt to redeem myself was a report on the Black Sea. Intent on showing Anderson that I deserved recognition, I traveled to the Seattle Library and filled pages and pages with facts and history cribbed from the sources like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I thought of as the scholarly uncle to the kid-friendly World Book that we had at home. But while the deluge approach worked with my fifth-grade Delaware opus, the expectations had changed in the two years since. Anderson gave me a low grade (I don’t recall precisely how low, but it was bad enough that it stuck with me). Despite my high opinion of myself, in the objective analysis of Anderson—and other teachers that year—I was below average.
When the school year ended, I had all my teachers sign my yearbook, marking the space where I wanted them to sign—where I also included the exhortation, “Give me an A+!” Of course, none obliged. I didn’t deserve any. Back home, I got out a pencil and wrote at the bottom of the page in big bubble letters, “Wow! You Teachers are Something to Forget! Goodbye!”
Up to that point I had floated through school thanks to teachers who saw potential under my mask of indifference. At Lakeside they seemed to see only the mask. I’m sure after that first year at my new school, my parents questioned whether they’d made the right decision. I certainly did.
But if I’d been paying attention to the final issue of the Lakeside newspaper that spring, I would have noticed a two-paragraph story at the bottom of the second page. It said that starting in the fall, the math department was going to get connected to a computer. “Hopefully some students will use it to work on extensive projects,” the story mused.
At the beginning of eighth grade, I started noticing this certain kid at the lower school. He was hard to miss. Tall, with unruly brown hair, Kent Evans had a deep cleft lip and spoke with a slight impediment. Later I would learn that as a baby, his lip and palate were so badly deformed Kent’s parents had to feed him with an eyedropper. By the time I got to know him in our second year, Kent had endured a series of painful operations that left his mouth full of orthodontia and slackly open all the time. Looking back now, I think those earlier challenges helped seed a fearlessness that would manifest itself again and again in the too-short time I knew him.
Kent and I were both in Mr. Stocklin’s eighth-grade math class. Kent was quiet, hardly ever participated, but I could tell he knew what was going on. He seemed math-smart, at least from what I could tell from across the classroom. He struck me as more serious than any other kid in class.
I learned that he was new to Seattle. He and his family had moved here only a year earlier, right before seventh grade. Due to his father’s job as a Unitarian minister, they moved around, living in Victoria, British Columbia, before coming to Seattle. Like me, Kent didn’t easily fit into the established cliques at Lakeside. He was far from athletic and not one of the cool kids everyone gravitated toward. Unlike me, he didn’t care. Social position, and even what others thought of him, didn’t seem to touch Kent. He lived for himself and his interests, which he pursued intensely, way beyond what you’d imagine for a twelve-year-old. In eighth grade, that interest was national politics.
This was the fall of 1968, the close of a year that would be remembered as one of the most tumultuous in American history. The span of just a few months brought the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and the televised beatings of protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and riots from Baltimore to Boston. Opposition to the Vietnam War went from heated to a full boil. President Johnson bowed out from seeking reelection, opening the field to a host of Democrats vying to keep Republican Richard Nixon from the White House.
Kent had strong and informed views on all these issues. He was vehemently against the Vietnam War, hated Nixon, loved Ted Kennedy (he devoured the senator’s book on Democratic policy). He studied the latest cases being fought by the American Civil Liberties Union and decried the rise of the science-denying conspiracy theory that water fluoridation was a communist plot to poison us. He idolized Eugene McCarthy, the U.S. senator from Minnesota running for the Democratic nomination against LBJ. I’m sure Kent modeled himself a bit on McCarthy’s image as the intellectual liberal, even winning a seat on the Lakeside student senate (after losing a bid for secretary-treasurer).
When McCarthy failed to win the Democratic nomination in 1968, Kent threw himself into Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. He carpeted his yard with red and blue Humphrey signs, canvassed door-to-door, and passed out flyers downtown for Humphrey and the Democrats running for governor and the U.S. Senate. When Humphrey visited Seattle, Kent staked out the Olympic Hotel hoping to talk to the candidate (he failed but a month later proudly reported that he shook hands with Humphrey’s running mate, Edmund Muskie). If you were active in the Democratic Party in Seattle at this time, there’s a good chance you saw the pudgy teenager at rallies and the local headquarters on Union Street, the lone kid among the political operators and reporters.
One of our Lakeside teachers liked to tell the story of how surprised he was to bump into Kent at a party meeting and then hear Kent’s take on the group’s machinations and behind-the-scenes power struggles. “He knew more about politics than I would ever know,” the teacher said. So obsessed was Kent with the presidential race that year, he used initials of the candidates to mark up his quizzes in French class: Nixon’s initials for wrong answers and Humphrey’s for correct ones. In the 1968 presidential election, of course, Nixon won. Kent’s disappointment was mitigated slightly by his belief that he helped deliver Humphrey a narrow victory in our home state of Washington.
This intensity intrigued me. If he liked something, Kent went all in. As the author of a wood-bound, 177-page disquisition on the state of Delaware, I could appreciate this. One English teacher dinged him for being too intense. “His only shortcoming at the moment is excess preparation,” the teacher wrote on Kent’s report card in his first year. “For a recent 40-minute paper he produced an outline for a master’s thesis.” Unlike me, he got good grades.
Kent and I became best friends very quickly. Not too long after we met, we joined a camping trip with a Lakeside teacher known for leading kids on long, rain-soaked slogs in the woods. The hike he chose took us along Washington’s rugged coastline. At night Kent and I pitched our tent on the beach, not focusing on how close we were to the Pacific Ocean. Later that night I woke up to Kent shaking me as the seawater sloshed into our tent and inundated our sleeping bags. Laughing hysterically, we fled, dragging our tent to higher ground.
Already close, from that point on we were inseparable. Conversations that we started at school would continue that night over the phone. I’d stretch the spirals out of the phone cord down the stairs into my room and we’d talk for hours. I still remember his phone number.
Like most kids I spent almost zero time thinking about my future, aside from a vague notion that I wanted to be a scientist, or maybe a lawyer like my dad. But at that age, it’s hard to envision how getting the right answers on tests translates into a life beyond school, let alone the distant horizon of a career. Kent was way ahead of us. He was always talking about where he wanted to be in ten years, in twenty years, and strategizing how to get there. He seemed certain he was destined for great things and just had to figure out the best of the many paths to achieve them.
Together we read through a stack of biographies of famous people, leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur. We spent hours on the phone dissecting their lives. We analyzed the paths they followed to success with the same teenage intensity that other kids at that time spent deciphering “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” What about going to West Point and becoming an Army general? We learned how MacArthur was programmed from an early age to pursue a military career. We compared that path with General Patton, who sort of fell into his life as a brilliant soldier and leader. For historical perspective we read books on Napoleon, marveling at his genius and his terrible flaws. The only way to really distinguish yourself was to be a war hero, we decided. But neither of us wanted to go to war. Cross general off the list. How about the U.S. Foreign Service? We found that only political appointees seemed to get the best jobs, and based on a report Kent had ordered from some government office, the pay for embassy staff was low. Off the list. What about becoming a professor? They had clout and the freedom to research cool things, but Kent worried again that the pay might be low. Or a politician? Maybe a lawyer like my dad?
I was the kind of kid who wanted to win every game I played, yet I had no particular aim beyond victory. I was raw intelligence, an information omnivore, but I wasn’t thinking about the long-term direction of my life. Kent’s ambition would help spark mine and channel my prodigious competitive drive.
Even as we were imagining our futures, the road that we would ultimately follow was right in front of us.
One morning that fall of eighth grade, Mr. Stocklin led our class to McAllister House, a white clapboard building that was home to the math department. Inside we heard a chug-chug-chug sound echoing down the hallway—like a cog railway grinding its way up the side of a mountain. Down a hall, a group of upper-school kids were gathered in a former office hunched over what looked like a typewriter with a rotary telephone dial on one side.
Mr. Stocklin explained that it was a teletype machine. With it we could connect to a computer to play games, and even write our own computer programs. The computer itself wasn’t at Lakeside, he explained, but somewhere else—it was in California—and we logged in to it over a phone line. That’s why the teletype had a phone dial on it. What our teacher described, I would soon learn, was called timesharing, a method of parceling out one computer to multiple users at the same time. I had always thought of computers as big boxes run by specialists in university labs, bank basements, and other places that most people never visited. At the World’s Fair I had seen a UNIVAC computer, a series of refrigerator-sized boxes taller than a person and the length of a small truck. The machine, called the “library of the future,” was run by a man who took questions from the audience and fed them into the computer, which spit out answers.
It was hard to imagine that I would be able to play on a computer myself.
Dan Ayrault, who would become Lakeside’s headmaster within a year, once described Lakeside as “a school of very few rules.” Few rules meant that Lakeside teachers were free to experiment. If a student had a burning interest in a topic, his teacher could deviate from whatever they had planned to teach and run in a new direction. The school hired with an eye for teachers deeply interested in their fields and who had real expertise. Some had worked in industry, at places like Boeing. One was an astrophysicist. There were a few lawyers. Another, who would become my chemistry teacher senior year, had patented a method for isolating the amino acid tryptophan.
The assumption was that this caliber of instructor would be confident in giving students room to explore—even if that meant pushing boundaries. Robert Fulghum, who taught art, was an ordained minister who would go on to fame with his bestselling book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. This was some years after Fulghum had tested the freewheeling spirit of Lakeside by hiring nude models for his art classes. The math department’s equivalent of those nude models was this computer terminal.
We had it thanks in part to Bill Dougall, the head of Lakeside’s math department. Like a lot of the faculty, Bill held a broader definition of education than sitting in a classroom passively listening to a lecture. He had been a World War II Navy pilot and worked as an aeronautical engineer at Boeing. Somewhere along the way he had studied French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris on top of graduate degrees in engineering and education. An avid mountain climber and explorer who took a sabbatical to build a windmill in Kathmandu, he was the teacher who led the seawater-soaked trip where Kent and I bonded. His camping trips were a sacred tradition at Lakeside, infamous treks through whatever weather the Pacific Northwest could throw at forty boys and a few intrepid teachers.
After Bill Dougall and several other faculty members took a summer computer class, they began pushing to bring computer access to Lakeside. In 1968 that meant paying for the monthly lease of the teletype machine and the hourly rate to connect to a timeshared computer. The terminal could cost over $1,000 a year and the computer time expense, at about $8 an hour, could run thousands more. Dougall had the support of the headmaster, but it was hard to justify the expense; high schools and homes just didn’t have computers. Mr. Dougall then made the connection with a group of Lakeside parents who ran an annual rummage sale to raise money for school activities. In March 1967 the Lakeside Mothers’ Club, as their official organization was known, borrowed space in a downtown office building, and in three days they raised about $3,000, enough to rent a cutting-edge Teletype ASR-33 and pay for enough computer time to get started.
The amusing part of this miracle is that no one knew how to use the thing. Mr. Dougall exhausted his programming knowledge within a week. A math teacher named Fred Wright had studied programming languages but had no practical computer experience. Still, on a hunch that this terminal was a good thing, the school bet that someone would figure it out.
All these years later it still amazes me how so many disparate things had to come together for me to use a computer in 1968. Beyond the leap of faith made by those teachers and parents who got us the terminal, and beyond the stroke of luck that people were now sharing computers over phone lines, completing this miracle was the decision by two Dartmouth professors to create the BASIC programming language. Just four years old at the time, the “Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code” was made to help students in nontechnical fields get started with computer programming. One of its attributes was that it used commands, such as GOTO, IF, THEN, and RUN, that made sense to humans. BASIC is what hooked me and made me want to come back.
On the wall next to the terminal, a teacher had tacked up a half sheet of paper with the most rudimentary directions to get started, including how to sign in and which keys to press when something went wrong. It also warned ominously that typing “ ‘PRINT’ WITHOUT A STATEMENT NUMBER MAY CAUSE LOSS OF CONTROL.”
The page included a sample program written in BASIC telling the computer how to add two numbers.
Ready…
10 INPUT X,Y
20 LET A=X+Y
30 PRINT A
40 END
That was probably the first computer program I ever typed in. The elegance of the four lines of code appealed to my sense of order. Its instantaneous answer was like a jolt of electricity. From there, I wrote the first computer program of my own—a game of tic-tac-toe. Getting it to work forced me to think through for the first time the most basic elements of the game’s rules. Immediately, I learned that the computer was a dumb machine that I had to tell every single step it should take, under every single circumstance that could occur. When I wrote imprecise code, the computer couldn’t infer or guess what I meant. I made a lot of errors trying to figure that out. When I finally got it right, the sense of accomplishment far outstripped the result. A game of tic-tac-toe is so simple, even kids learn it quickly. But it felt like a triumph to get a machine to do it.
I loved how the computer forced me to think. It was completely unforgiving in the face of mental sloppiness. It demanded that I be logically consistent and pay attention to details. One misplaced comma or semicolon and the thing wouldn’t work.
It reminded me of solving mathematical proofs. Programming doesn’t require math skills (beyond the basics), but it does demand the same kind of rigorous, logical approach to problem-solving, breaking problems down into smaller, more manageable parts. And like solving a problem in algebra, there are different ways to write programs that work—some more elegant and efficient than others—but infinite ways to make a program that fails. And mine failed all the time. Only after persevering, forcing myself to think smart, could I coax a program to run flawlessly.
Another early program I wrote was a lunar lander game. The problem: safely touch down a lunar lander on the moon without crashing and before you run out of fuel. From that I had to break the problem down into steps. I had to solve how the game player moved the lander left and right, up and down, how much fuel it had, how fast it burned. I also had to describe what it looked like and how to display the ship in dashes and asterisks on the screen.
Not long after Lakeside installed the terminal, Mr. Stocklin wrote a program that contained an infinite loop, meaning it ran continuously before someone eventually stopped it—but not before it burned through over a hundred dollars of our precious rummage-sale budget. I’m not sure he showed his face again in that room. It was a lesson to all of us.
To avoid racking up charges, I’d write out as much of my program as I could with pen and paper before elbowing into my place at the machine. With the machine offline to avoid time charges, I’d type it in and the program would print on a roll of inch-wide paper tape. That was step one. Then I’d dial the phone—the rotary dial on the side of the terminal—and wait for the buzz of the modem to confirm that I’d connected. I’d then feed my tape in, and chug-chug-chug, the program would input at a blistering ten characters per second. Finally, I’d type “RUN.” Typically there was a gaggle of other kids waiting for the computer, so if my program didn’t work, I’d have to log off and find a spot to sort through where I went wrong, then wait my turn to get back on the teletype.
This feedback loop was addictive. The feeling of getting better and better was a rush. Writing programs flowed from a combination of skills that came easy to me: logical thinking and an ability to focus intensely for long periods. Programming also stoked the persistent need I had to prove myself.
The atmosphere of that computer room was a (mostly) healthy mix of cooperation and competition. We were a mosh pit of teenage boys all trying to outdo one another. A gap of only two or three years isn’t much in the grand scheme of things but feels like a lot when you’re thirteen, small for your age, with some indeterminate time until your growth spurt. Kent and I were among the youngest kids in that group. The assumed superiority of some of the older kids bothered us.
I was an eighth-grader confident in my brain power and convinced that my intensity meant I could do anything the older guys could do—if not better, then at least faster. I was determined to not let anyone get anything on me. Kent also hated being put-upon by someone else. Maybe even more than me.
A sophomore named Paul Allen picked this up immediately, and he exploited it beautifully. “Bill, you think you’re so smart, you figure this thing out.” Those are some of the first words said to me by the person who I would go on to cofound Microsoft with years later. It was a few weeks after Lakeside opened the computer room and a group of kids were all jockeying for time on the machine. With no instruction aside from a few hand-me-down books from our teachers, everyone was trying to piece together how to write their first programs.
At fifteen, Paul was two years older than us and considered himself way cooler. His crafted social position was Renaissance Man, as able to cite the throw weight of an ICBM as he could identify the chord changes in a Jimi Hendrix song. He was a serious guitarist and looked the part too; he was the only one with muttonchops. Unlike a lot of us, Paul had been interested in computers for a while, inspired by what he saw at the World’s Fair and what he read in volumes and volumes of science fiction. Two years earlier as an eighth-grader at Lakeside, Paul used his graduation speech to paint a bright future of computers woven throughout our society, even predicting that within a few decades a computer would have the ability to think.
What he hadn’t done until that fall in the computer room was actually use a computer. Of course, with Paul’s goading, I threw myself into figuring it out, determined to be the first to write more complex programs than the older kids.
Some form of that scenario repeated again and again, even away from the terminal. The pattern went like this: Paul would push me. “Hey Bill, I bet you can’t do this math problem,” and then I’d battle my way through the problem to prove I could. Other times, it was “Hey Bill, I bet you can’t beat [fill in the name of anyone else in the room] at chess.” Each time I took the bait. I’d throw myself at whatever dare Paul issued until I solved/won/finished it. That dynamic would come to define the broader relationship between Kent and me on one side and Paul and his friend, another sophomore named Ric Weiland, on the other. Paul and Ric shared an interest in electronic gadgets, a hobby that for Ric was probably sparked by his dad, an engineer at Boeing who had invented a critical part of a wing assembly. A few years earlier Ric had made a simple computer of electric relays that could play tic-tac-toe. Ric was quieter and cerebral, less of an antagonist than Paul. Paired by age difference, we were rivals; as a foursome, Paul, Ric, Kent, and I became friends.
As the weeks went by, a lot of the kids who’d first played around with the terminal lost interest and drifted away, leaving a smaller group of hard-core adherents. Code-writing was a social leveler. Age didn’t matter if you could write good programs and figure out cool problems. A senior named Bob McCaw created a casino program from scratch. His classmate Harvey Motulsky tried to teach the computer to play Monopoly. I worked to expand the Monopoly program so that the computer could play itself. Kent modified math programs that he copied from a book by the RAND Corporation. Together he and I figured out how to combine nouns, verbs, adjectives, and syntax to make a random sentence generator, a very primitive version of the AI chatbots that would emerge decades later. We’d have it string sentences together and then laugh at the kooky stories it told.
This surge of creativity, I realize in hindsight, was the intentional outcome of brilliant guidance—or I should say lack of guidance. Fred Wright, the math teacher, was the de facto overseer of the computer room. Fred was young, in his late twenties. He had been hired at Lakeside just two years earlier. He was a perfect fit for the school, a teacher who was thrilled when kids found their own route to an answer. I would later have him as a teacher, and he watched, amused, as I powered through geometry problems using algebra, happy to let me explore that less-efficient path while intuitively knowing that I’d eventually figure out the easier, better way.
Fred ran the computer room with the same philosophy. No sign-up sheet, no locked door, no formal instruction (Lakeside didn’t yet offer computer classes). He kept the room open, let us come as we pleased, trusting that without limits we’d have to be creative and find a path to teach ourselves. Occasionally Fred poked his crew-cut head in to break up a squabble or listen to an excited kid explain whatever neat program he was writing. At some point a student taped a sign above the door, “Beware of the Wrath of Fred Wright,” a tongue-in-cheek nod to Fred’s laissez-faire oversight. A few faculty members argued for tighter regulations over the computer room (What are those boys doing in there?). Fred rebuffed them every time. That left a power vacuum that we kids instantly filled. From early on it was our domain, our clubhouse. That fall we basically lived in that room in a loop of writing programs, having them fail, and trying again and again. Our grades suffered, our parents worried. But we learned and learned quickly. It was the most fun I’d ever had at school.
Every morning I commuted to Lakeside in a carpool run by the mothers of neighbor kids. Typically, the car would be silent for the twenty-minute drive, all of us still half asleep or cramming some last-minute homework. My mom split the driving with other moms, each handling a day or two of the week. Every Monday and Tuesday I knew that I’d climb into a convertible blue Chevelle, and without fail Tom Rona’s mother would have way more energy than anyone should that early in the morning, except my own mom. Monique Rona was French, and in her thickly accented English she’d draw her drowsy passengers into a conversation. In the fall of 1968, we talked about computers. At Lakeside we were running out of money to pay for our computer time. Mrs. Rona would become our unlikely savior. Soon our small group would have the rarest of gifts: free access to one of the most powerful computers available.
As a child in France during World War II, Monique Rona played a role in the French Resistance, serving as a decoy to divert German soldiers away from Jewish safe houses. Later, as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, she married an engineering student, and after the war the couple emigrated to the United States, where her husband got a degree from MIT and she studied mathematics. A job offer from Boeing brought them to Seattle, where her husband became a senior scientist; Mrs. Rona landed a job as the deputy director of the University of Washington’s computer lab. (At the time, this type of job was rarely held by women.)
Mrs. Rona picked up on my enthusiasm for my new hobby and would ask me about what I was working on, jolting me out of my silent puzzling through some programming problem. With just a month or two of experience, I’m sure that I came across way more confident than I should have. Still, she was curious, interested in what I said, and never talked down to me.
As it happens, that fall Mrs. Rona was setting up one of the first computer timesharing companies in Seattle. Through the university’s computer lab, she had met a salesman from Digital Equipment Corp., a Boston-area company that was then a pioneering maker of minicomputers. DEC had established itself in the early 1960s by selling powerful small computers—they were called minicomputers—to research institutions and university labs that didn’t need expensive mainframe computers from IBM and other large computer vendors. Over time, DEC moved upmarket and in 1966 began selling a computer called the PDP-10 that was far more powerful than its minicomputer cousins but still more affordable than leading mainframes. And it was geared toward timesharing.
Mrs. Rona, the Digital guy, and their other cofounders (also from the UW computer lab) saw an opportunity in the Seattle area, where big companies like Boeing would likely be expanding their computer use, and smaller ones might be enticed to computerize for the first time. The team leased the latest PDP-10 machine. They called the venture Computer Center Corp., or CCC. As a math nerd, I couldn’t help but call it “C-Cubed.”
At Lakeside, meanwhile, our new hobby was getting expensive. The minutes added up. Aware of this, Mrs. Rona wrote a letter to Lakeside with a surprising proposal: if some of the school’s young programmers helped her venture, the company would—and this is the crazy part—give us free access to their new DEC computer.
On a Saturday in November 1968, my dad dropped me off at C-Cubed’s new headquarters, where I met Mr. Wright, Paul, Kent, Ric, and a few Lakeside upperclassmen. The office was near the University of Washington in an old Buick dealership within earshot of Interstate 5. Across the street, a self-proclaimed anarchist would soon open Morningtown Café, a hippie hangout, where over the next twelve months I’d eat hundreds of their pepperoni pizza slices.
From the outside, C-Cubed looked every bit the car dealership it once was, with one difference: through huge windows that must have once displayed Electras and Skylarks, there was a long row of teletype terminals identical to the one we had at Lakeside. Inside, a C-Cubed engineer showed us around. He explained that the company planned to open for business at the end of the year. That gave them two months to make sure their new computer was ready for the rigors of managing perhaps hundreds of different users at the same time.
Some context: Today, any business buying a computer system can expect it to run software that’s been thoroughly tested for reliability, security, and stability. Not so in 1968. Companies like DEC and its competitors, including IBM and GE, made their money on hardware—the chips, tape storage drives, and processing units that comprised the actual computer, all the stuff in the refrigerator-sized box and devices connected to it. By comparison, software was an afterthought, so low in value it was thrown in for free. Even after a customer leased or bought a computer, its operating system (the software that controls the main functions of the computer) often required a lot of extra testing and debugging before it was ready for heavy everyday use.
That’s where we came in. To help improve their software, DEC struck a deal with C-Cubed. As long as the new venture found and reported bugs, DEC would waive its monthly leasing fee. In industry terms it’s called assurance testing—and typically involves a set period of time for a customer to assure its new computer system performs as promised. C-Cubed saw this as an opportunity to delay paying for their usage for as long as possible.
The deal arranged by Mrs. Rona gave us kids open access to their system, the only stipulation being that when the machine crashed or did something weird, we had to document it. Paradoxically, breaking it was a good thing. They’d rather have teenagers find a problem before paying customers did. Plus, more bugs filed meant more time not paying their lease. C-Cubed needed monkeys. Monkeys with hammers.