Let's now turn to the history of Bill Gates. His story is
almost as well known as the Beatles'. Brilliant, young math
whiz discovers computer programming. Drops out of Har­
vard. Starts a little computer company called Microsoft
with his friends. Through sheer brilliance and ambition
and guts builds it into the giant of the software world.
That's the broad outline. Let's dig a little bit deeper.
Gates's father was a wealthy lawyer in Seattle, and
his mother was the daughter of a well-to-do banker. As
a child Bill was precocious and easily bored by his stud­
ies. So his parents took him out of public school and, at
the beginning of seventh grade, sent him to Lakeside, a
private school that catered to Seattle's elite families. Mid­
way through Gates's second year at Lakeside, the school
started a computer club.

"The Mothers' Club at school did a rummage sale
every year, and there was always the question of what the
money would go to," Gates remembers. "Some went to
the summer program, where inner-city kids would come
up to the campus. Some of it would go for teachers. That
year, they put three thousand dollars into a computer ter­
minal down in this funny little room that we subsequently
took control of. It was kind of an amazing thing."
It was an "amazing thing," of course, because this
was 1968. Most colleges didn't have computer clubs in the
1960s. Even more remarkable was the kind of computer
Lakeside bought. The school didn't have its students learn
programming by the laborious computer-card system, like
virtually everyone else was doing in the 1960s. Instead,
Lakeside installed what was called an ASR-33 Teletype,
which was a time-sharing terminal with a direct link to
a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. "The whole
idea of time-sharing only got invented in nineteen sixty-
five," Gates continued. "Someone was pretty forward-
looking." Bill Joy got an extraordinary, early opportunity
to learn programming on a time-share system as a fresh­
man in college, in 1971. Bill Gates got to do real-time pro­
gramming as an eighth grader in 1968.

From that moment forward, Gates lived in the computer
room. He and a number of others began to teach them­
selves how to use this strange new device. Buying time
on the mainframe computer the ASR was hooked up to
was, of course, expensive—even for a wealthy institution
like Lakeside—and it wasn't long before the $3,000 put
up by the Mothers' Club ran out. The parents raised more
money. The students spent it. Then a group of program­
mers at the University of Washington formed an out­
fit called Computer Center Corporation (or C-Cubed),
which leased computer time to local companies. As luck
would have it, one of the founders of the firm—Monique
Rona—had a son at Lakeside, a year ahead of Gates.
Would the Lakeside computer club, Rona wondered, like
to test out the company's software programs on the week­
ends in exchange for free programming time? Absolutely!
After school, Gates took the bus to the C-Cubed offices
and programmed long into the evening.

C-Cubed eventually went bankrupt, so Gates and his
friends began hanging around the computer center at the
University of Washington. Before long, they latched onto
an outfit called ISI (Information Sciences Inc.), which
agreed to let them have free computer time in exchange
for working on a piece of software that could be used to
automate company payrolls. In one seven-month period
in 1971, Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of com­
puter time on the ISI mainframe, which averages out to
eight hours a day, seven days a week.

"It was my obsession," Gates says of his early high
school years. "I skipped athletics. I went up there at night.
We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week
that we wouldn't get twenty or thirty hours in. There was
a period where Paul Allen and I got in trouble for steal­
ing a bunch of passwords and crashing the system. We
got kicked out. I didn't get to use the computer the whole
summer. This is when I was fifteen and sixteen. Then I
found out Paul had found a computer that was free at the
University of Washington. They had these machines in
the medical center and the physics department. They were
on a twenty-four-hour schedule, but with this big slack
period, so that between three and six in the morning they
never scheduled anything." Gates laughed. "I'd leave at
night, after my bedtime. I could walk up to the University
of Washington from my house. Or Fd take the bus. That's
why I'm always so generous to the University of Wash­
ington, because they let me steal so much computer time."
(Years later, Gates's mother said, "We always wondered
why it was so hard for him to get up in the morning.")
One of the founders of ISI, Bud Pembroke, then got a
call from the technology company TRW, which had just
signed a contract to set up a computer system at the huge
Bonneville Power station in southern Washington State.
TRW desperately needed programmers familiar with
the particular software the power station used. In these
early days of the computer revolution, programmers with
that kind of specialized experience were hard to find. But
Pembroke knew exactly whom to call: those high school
kids from Lakeside who had been running up thousands
of hours of computer time on the ISI mainframe. Gates
was now in his senior year, and somehow he managed to
convince his teachers to let him decamp for Bonneville
under the guise of an independent study project. There he
spent the spring writing code, supervised by a man named
John Norton, who Gates says taught him as much about
programming as almost anyone he'd ever met.
Those five years, from eighth grade through the end of
high school, were Bill Gates's Hamburg, and by any mea­
sure, he was presented with an even more extraordinary
series of opportunities than Bill Joy.

Opportunity number one was that Gates got sent to
Lakeside. How many high schools in the world had access to
a time-sharing terminal in 1968? Opportunity number two
was that the mothers of Lakeside had enough money to pay
for the school's computer fees. Number three was that, when
that money ran out, one of the parents happened to work
at C-Cubed, which happened to need someone to check
its code on the weekends, and which also happened not to
care if weekends turned into weeknights. Number four was
that Gates just happened to find out about ISI, and ISI just
happened to need someone to work on its payroll software.
Number five was that Gates happened to live within walk­
ing distance of the University of Washington. Number six
was that the university happened to have free computer time
between three and six in the morning. Number seven was
that TRW happened to call Bud Pembroke. Number eight
was that the best programmers Pembroke knew for that par­
ticular problem happened to be two high school kids. And
number nine was that Lakeside was willing to let those kids
spend their spring term miles away, writing code.
And what did virtually all of those opportunities have
in common? They gave Bill Gates extra time to practice.
By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard after his soph­
omore year to try his hand at his own software company,
he'd been programming practically nonstop for seven con­
secutive years. He was way past ten thousand hours. How
many teenagers in the world had the kind of experience
Gates had? "If there were fifty in the world, I'd be
stunned," he says. "There was C-Cubed and the payroll
stuff we did, then TRW—all those things came together.
I had a better exposure to software development at a young
age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all
because of an incredibly lucky series of events."