“I knew more [about computers] than he did for the first day, but only for that first day.”—Bill Gates’s math teacher
Seattle, Washington, 1968
As the Vietnam War turned college campuses into battlegrounds, and as racial tension caused American cities to erupt in flames, one freckle-faced Seattle boy with thick glasses barely seemed to notice. Instead, he took the first steps to build a different revolution that would also change the world.
Bill Gates liked his parents at a time when others were rebelling against theirs. He was a short boy with big feet who worried so much that his little toe was crooked that he spent hours trying to straighten it. He was intensely competitive. When he thought or listened intently, he folded his hands in his lap and rocked back and forth. He snapped at his classmates and instructors when they couldn’t understand what he meant. He was so good in math and science that his elementary school teachers ran out of things to teach him. They urged his parents to send him to an expensive private school in Seattle called Lakeside Prep. That was no problem for the wealthy Gates family.
MOTHS TO MICROCHIPS
The first automatic computer, born in 1943, was nicknamed Mark L. Mark. It was fifty-one feet long. The moths that flew around inside it could foul it up for days. Getting them out was called “debugging” the computer. The next computer was faster, but it still weighed thirty tons. The invention of transistors—small wafers of sandy material on which electrical current could flow without burning out or using miles of wire—made it possible to move great quantities of information on small machines. In 1971, engineers developed the microchip, which allowed the computer to run on fingernail-size chips. In 1975, the year Bill Gates turned nineteen, the first desktop computers were being developed. He was ready to write and sell the software needed to operate the millions of personal computers that would soon enter homes and offices.
Bill Gates, in a photo from his high school yearbook. The caption reads WHO IS THIS MAN?
In the spring of 1968, when the United States was about to put an astronaut on the moon, Lakeside’s teachers decided their students needed to know about computers. In those years, computers were huge machines stuffed with tubes that cost millions of dollars. Even Lakeside couldn’t afford a computer, so parents raised three thousand dollars through a raffle to rent student time on a computer in downtown Seattle. They also bought a Teletype machine that allowed users to send messages back and forth to the computer.
Twelve-year-old Bill Gates first saw what a computer could do on a warm spring day when his eighth-grade math class visited Lakeside’s computer room. Bill sat down at the Teletype machine, and, with advice from a teacher, pecked out a few instructions. He was amazed when the computer soon wrote him back the correct answers. He tried again. It worked again. For Bill, it was like falling head over heels in love. Though he couldn’t see it, the object of his passion was about the size and shape of a refrigerator. It was called the PDP-10, and it sat in an office miles away.
Bill and a handful of classmates began to hole up in Lakeside’s computer room most of the day and deep into the night, ordering out for pizza, reading books about computers, and typing instructions called programs to make the computer do what they wanted. They tried to win games. The first program was a tic-tac-toe game. Then it was Monopoly. Soon they knew much more than their teachers about computers.
But they began to get in trouble at Lakeside, cutting classes and not turning in homework. Worse yet, they used up of all the school’s computer time in just a few weeks. Luckily for him, Bill’s parents supported his passion. They were glad that something absorbed his intellect.
That fall, Lakeside school officials made a deal with a new company in Seattle that offered cheaper rates for the students to use a computer that was much more powerful than the PDP-10. Bill Gates, his fifteen-year-old friend Paul Allen, and a few others formed the Lakeside Programmers Group and dedicated themselves to finding ways to use computer skills in the real world. They envisioned a day when nearly everyone would have a small personal computer, and they wanted to get rich writing the programs that made them operate. Their round-the-clock experiments brought the system crashing down again and again. When the company tried to secure it, the kids foiled the computer’s security system like house thieves picking a lock.
IT CAN’T BE DONE
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
—Charles H. Duell, commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899
“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground and try to find oil? You’re crazy.”
—Edwin L. Drake, to those who asked him to invest in their project, 1859
“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”
—Western Union memo, 1876
“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
—Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895
“Who … wants to hear actors talk?”
—H. M. Warner, of Warner Bros., 1927
“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”
—Decca recording company, rejecting the Beatles, 1962
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
—Ken Olson, president, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
Instead of getting mad, the company’s executives hired the Lakeside students to fix the weaknesses in the system. They offered a beautiful deal: all the free time they wanted at the computer. “It was when we got free time … that we really got into computers,” Gates later said. “I mean, then it became hardcore.” Worried that the machine was simply inhaling their son, Bill’s parents ordered him to stop working on computers for a while. And so he did, for most of a year.
TRY IT FOR YOURSELF
American scientists worked hard to develop computers for military applications during World War II. In 1946, when the war was over, a few civilians got a first peek at ENIAC, which was ten feet tall and stuffed with eighteen thousand tubes. Reporters were skeptical as they watched a scientist prepare to demonstrate it. “Watch closely,” said Dr. Arthur Burks, “you may miss it.” He then told ENIAC to multiply 97,367 by itself five thousand times and pushed a button. The answer came in “less than the blink of an eye,” creating a room full of believers.
He came back with hurricane force. The Lakeside Programmers found computers on a university campus, and they got even more free time. It was there that they began to sell their services. Bill’s father, a lawyer, gave him legal advice about contracts and deals. Making money meant a lot to Bill. He later recalled, “I was the guy who said, ‘Let’s call the real world and try to sell something to it.’” A company hired them to write a program to computerize company payrolls. They agreed, but this time Lakeside Programmers wanted more than just free time. Bill insisted that every time the company sold a program, the group would get a percentage of the money. They made twenty thousand dollars.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen found new ways to sell their talent. They started their own company, called Traf-O-Data, and produced a small computer to help cities measure how automobile traffic flowed. Another company hired them to find the bugs in their computer system. They even made a few thousand dollars computerizing Lakeside Prep’s class scheduling.
By the time Bill Gates graduated from Lakeside Prep at seventeen, he was a world-class expert in computer programming. His senior yearbook photo shows him stretched out on a table in the computer room with a telephone in his hand and a knitted cap pulled over his eyes. The caption says WHO IS THIS MAN? The world would soon find out.
He went to Harvard but dropped out at the age of nineteen when Paul Allen noticed a magazine article describing the first personal computers. They formed a company called Microsoft and began to write software programs for the new computers. As this is written, Microsoft is the world’s most profitable company, and Bill Gates, now married and a father, is the richest person in the world. Paul Allen also became a multimillionaire.