Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (7 page)

Power Administration’s power grid for the Northwest. Computers would analyze the power needs of the region and control the amount of electricity generated by hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River. TRW had set up offices in Vancouver, across the Columbia River from Portland. The power-monitoring system would use several PDP-10 computers, and TRW was to write the software. But the project soon fell behind schedule. As usual, the PDP-10 software was infested with bugs. The contract called for a real-time control system with 99.9 percent reliability; if TRW couldn’t get the software problems fixed, and soon, it would have to pay substantial contract penalties.

It was time to call in the exterminators.

An urgent request was made from TRW’s headquarters in Cleveland for bug-hunting experts with PDP-10 software. Following a lead from Digital Equipment Corporation, a TRW technician discovered the Problem Report Book at the bankrupt Computer Center Corporation in Seattle. The names of two bug hunters appeared on nearly every page—Bill Gates and Paul Allen. TRW contacted Gates by phone at his home, suggesting he and Allen come down to Vancouver for an interview.

“Bill and I went down there dressed in the best suits we could find,” Allen said.

Despite their youth, Gates and Allen were offered jobs, at $165 a week.

“We were just thrilled,” Allen said. “Up to that point, we had never been paid real money for doing anything on a computer. ... To get paid for something we loved doing ... we thought that was great.”

Instead of crashing the PDP-10 as they had done at C- Cubed, they were hired to work on restoring the system when it did crash.

Gates received permission from Lakeside to miss the second trimester of his senior year so he could work full-time at TRW. Allen dropped out of Washington State University, and the two found an apartment in Vancouver, 160 miles from Seattle.

It was at TRW that Gates began to develop as a serious computer programmer. Computer programming is more of an art than a science. The best programmers have a style as recognizable to other programmers as the brush stroke of a great painter. Gates fancies himself a master programmer, although today he hasn’t written code in years because he’s too busy running his company.

There were several top-notch programmers on the TRW project. One of the best was John Norton. He liked to write endless memos commenting on a programmer’s code. It was the first time Gates had seen anyone respond that way before, and it left a lasting impression. To this day, Gates sends his own electronic memos to his programmers at Microsoft, commenting on their codes. Often they are critical and sarcastic. More than one unlucky programmer at Microsoft has received E-mail at 2:00
a.m.
that began, “This is the stupidest piece of code ever written.”

Norton liked Gates and became something of a mentor, helping the intense, inquisitive teenager hone his programming skills. Whenever Gates made a mistake or did sloppy work, Norton would review his code and explain what he had done wrong or how he could do it better and more efficiently.

There was, however, still the matter of finishing high school. In the spring of 1973, having already been accepted at Harvard for the fall, Gates returned to Seattle for his final trimester at Lakeside. Although he had missed three months of school work, he quickly caught up. In a calculus class, he made his only appearance to take the final exam, which he aced. He received a “B” in the course, however, because the teacher felt that by never showing up, Gates had not displayed the “right attitude.”

Gates’ self-confidence was at an all-time high. Bill Hucks, also in the class of ’73 at Lakeside, remembers a squash match with Gates in the school gym shortly before they graduated in June. After the match, which Gates won, Hucks asked him, “So what’s your story? Where do you go from here?”

Gates said he was heading off to Harvard in the fall. Then he added, in a very matter-of-fact way: “I’m going to make my first million by the time I’m 25.” It was not said as a boast, or even a prediction. He talked about the future as if his success was predestined, a given, as certain as the mathematical proof that one plus one equals two.

“I remember it not surprising me,” said Hucks, who later went into journalism and now sells medical equipment in the Seattle area. “It was no big deal that this Gates guy was ambitious and was going to make money. Everyone at school knew his background.”

Following graduation, Gates returned to Vancouver to continue working with Allen on the TRW project. But his summer wasn’t completely a binary existence of zeros and ones, of late- night pizza and Coke in front of a computer terminal. He used part of his salary to buy a speed boat, and he and his friends water-skied on nearby lakes in Oregon and Washington when time allowed on weekends.

As the summer wore on and it was nearly time for Gates to leave Vancouver to attend college, he and Allen began to talk seriously about forming their own software company. For some time now they had shared the same vision, that one day the computer would be as commonplace in the home as a television set, and that these computers would need software—their software.

“We always had big dreams,” Allen said.

CHAPTER 2

“It’s Going to Happen”

B
ill Gates would later tell a friend he went to Harvard University to learn from people smarter than he was . . . and left disappointed.

He had arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1973 with no real sense of what he wanted to do with his life. Although he listed his academic major as prelaw, he had little interest in becoming a lawyer like his father. Nor did his parents have any expectations that he would. There was no pressure on him to be this or that. They only insisted he go to college and mix with other students. And what better environment for their son than Harvard, America’s oldest institution of higher learning? There was a mystique about the place. It conjured up images of success, power, influence . . . greatness. Supreme Court justices went to Harvard. So did presidents. Now their son had ascended into this rarefied intellectual atmosphere. Any plans he had to form a software company with Paul Allen would have to wait, his parents insisted.

“I was always vague about what I was going to do, but my parents wanted me to go to undergraduate school,” Gates said.

“They didn’t want me to go start a company or just go do graduate work. They didn’t have a specific plan in mind, but they thought I should live with other undergraduates, take normal undergraduate courses . . . which is exactly what I did.”

At Harvard, most first-year students live in dormitories in and near what is known as the Yard, next to Harvard Square in Cambridge. The Yard is the center of what was the original college, founded in 1636, just 16 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. At the end of their first year, students can apply to live in twelve residential houses.

Gates was assigned to one of the dorms his freshman year and roomed with two other students, Sam Znaimer and Jim Jenkins. They had been assigned the same room by chance. They didn’t know each other. The three came from vastly different backgrounds and cultures—just the kind of environment Gates’ parents were hoping for. Gates was a rich white kid from Seattle. Znaimer was a poor Jewish kid from Canada whose parents had immigrated to Montreal after the Holocaust. He was attending Harvard on a scholarship, majoring in chemistry. Jenkins was a middle-class black kid from Chattanooga, Tennessee, whose father was in the service.

“I found Bill fascinating,” recalled Znaimer, who today is a venture capitalist in Vancouver, British Columbia. “I had not run into too many people from fairly affluent, WASP backgrounds. I didn’t know those kinds of people in Montreal. Bill was someone who came from a comfortable family and had gone to a private school. He would talk about how some governor of the state of Washington used to hang out with his grandfather . . . which was not the world I was used to. On the other hand, Bill was very down-to-earth. There was not a lot of bullshit or pompousness about him. We all lived more or less the same lifestyle. We all ate together, worked together, and as a group we were all interested in science, engineering and that kind of stuff. We also all loved science fiction.”

When he enrolled at Harvard, Gates received permission to take both graduate and undergraduate courses. That was not unusual for gifted students. What was unusual was that he was allowed to set aside those graduate-level courses in math, physics, and computer science and apply the credits toward a graduate degree later. “About two-thirds of my courses were toward my undergraduate degree and about a third were set aside for my graduate degree, although it all doesn’t matter now since I didn’t complete either one,” said Gates.

That first year he took one of Harvard’s most difficult math courses, called “Math 55.” Almost everyone in the class had scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Gates did well in the course, but he was not the best. Two other students finished ahead of him, including Andy Braiterman, who lived in the same dorm as Gates. Braiterman had entered Harvard as a sophomore. He and Gates became good friends and later roomed together.

Gates took the typical undergraduate courses in economics, history, literature, and psychology. His attitude toward class work was much the same as it had been at Lakeside. He worked hard and did well in those courses he cared about. He didn’t work hard in courses that didn’t interest him. However, he still did well because he was so smart. In Greek literature his freshman year, Gates fell asleep during the final exam but still managed to receive a “B” in the class. “He was really very proud of that,” recalled Braiterman. “It was a story he liked to tell on himself.”

That Gates would fall asleep in class was not surprising. He was living on the edge. It was not unusual for him to go as long as three days without sleep. “How he coped with lack of sleep I never figured out,” said Znaimer. “I would kind of wimp out after 18 to 24 hours, but his habit was to do 36 hours or more at a stretch, collapse for ten hours, then go out, get a pizza, and go back at it. And if that meant he was starting again at three o’clock in the morning, so be it.”

His sleeping habits were just as bizarre. Gates never slept on sheets. He would collapse on his unmade bed, pull an electric blanket over his head and fall asleep instantly and soundly, regardless of the hour or activity in his room. (Gates still falls asleep instantaneously. When he flies, he often puts a blanket over his head and sleeps for the entire flight.)

“He didn’t seem to pay much attention to things he didn’t care about, whether it was clothes or sleep,” said Znaimer.

To his roommates and the small group of students he hung out with, Gates was a very intense character. He would often work himself into a frenzy of energy and start rocking back and forth, head in his hands, during a conversation or while reading or concentrating on a mental problem. Sometimes, he would wave his arms madly about to make a point in conversations.

Much of this energy was directed toward computers, just as it had been at Lakeside. Although Gates may not have decided what he was going to do with his life when he entered Harvard, to those who knew him there was little doubt about his real passion. He worked for weeks during his first year there on a BASIC program for a computer baseball game, which required that he figure out highly complex algorithms that would represent figures on the computer screen hitting, throwing, and catching a baseball. Even when he was sound asleep under his electric blanket, Gates was dreaming about computers. Once, about three o’clock in the morning, Gates began talking in his sleep, repeating over and over again, “One comma, one comma, one comma, one comma
...”

He spent many nights that year in the Aiken Computer Center at Harvard, which also had a PDP-10. Znaimer would sometimes drop by the computer building and find Gates hacking away at one of the machines. There were several games on the computers, including Steve Russell’s “Space Wars,” and Gates and Znaimer would play computer games into the early morning hours.

To unwind and relax, Gates, Znaimer, and Braiterman would go to movies in Cambridge or play pinball in an upstairs lounge in their dorm. The lounge also had an early version of the video game “Pong.” (This game had been designed by Nolan Bushnell, and it made him rich and famous. He sold the game through his startup company, Atari.)

As usual, when it came to games the competitive Gates almost always won. He became an exceptional player at both pinball and “Pong.”

“Other than playing pinball and going to a lot of movies,” said Znaimer, “we were all doing our share of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. . . with the exception that the rest of us were more overwhelmed by our hormones than Bill. I don’t remember him chasing any women, and there were lots of opportunities.”

No one who knew Gates at Harvard can recall him ever dating anyone while he was there. He did see one young woman occasionally when he returned home on holiday breaks to Seattle, but they were not romantically involved. The woman was Karen Gloyd, a freshman at Whitman College in Washington State. Gloyd was a couple years younger than Gates, having entered college early, at age 16. They met through their parents. Her stepfather was on the state bar association’s board of governors, as was Gates’ father. Gates did not make a very good impression on Gloyd. He lacked the social graces a young lady would have expected of a Harvard man. It was clear to Gloyd that Gates had had little experience with women. The first thing he wanted to know when they met was the score she made on her college SAT.

“It didn’t strike me as being a great pickup line at the time,” recalled Gloyd, now married. “It’s kind of amusing looking back on it, but at the time I really wasn’t that amused. I thought maybe I hadn’t heard him right. I thought it rather odd to say the least.” Gates then proceeded to explain to Gloyd that he had taken his Scholastic Aptitude Test twice so he could make a perfect score of 1600. (Math and verbal scores each count a maximum of 800 points.) Gates told her that when he first took the test, he breezed through the math portion but made a silly mistake and ended up with 790 points. The second time he took the test he got a perfect math score of 800. “At that point in the conversation,” said Gloyd, “I assumed we had very little in common.”

They did see each other a few more times. Once, when both were home from college, they accompanied their fathers on a bar association trip to Friday Harbor in the scenic San Juan Islands. Gloyd and several other young people on the trip took off in their parents’ cars and went into town at night to dance and party. Gates, however, stayed behind and played poker with the adults.

“Bill and I played tennis together a few times, but we really didn’t have much in common socially,” said Gloyd. “I always thought he was really nice, but I just thought he was sort of a brain, and I was more into partying, sororities, and that kind of thing. Bill was real shy. I didn’t get the impression at the time that he had a lot of experience dating girls and going out and doing social things. I may have thought of him then as being nerdy, but I think he just didn’t want to spend a lot of time doing things he wasn’t interested in.”

Although Gates may not have had much experience with girls, he did have experiences of another kind that set him apart from many of his peers at Harvard. He had already been out there in the “real world.” He even had his own company, Traf- O-Data. .

“That was one of the more interesting things about Bill,” said Znaimer. “Compared to the rest of us at Harvard, he was much more broadly grounded. You could find other people who were really good mathematicians or really good physicists. But Bill had a lot more hands-on experience. He had gone and worked in various environments, like TRW.”

Znaimer remembered Gates spending several nights in his dorm room in early 1974 working on an IRS tax return for his Traf-O-Data business. “I could not have told you which way was up on a tax form. It was something my parents did,” Znaimer said. “But Bill sure knew.”

While Gates was finishing his first year at Harvard, Paul Allen was back in Washington State trying to find new business for Traf-O-Data. He had negotiated deals with municipalities in several states, as well as Canada. But the enterprise was being undercut by the federal government, which had decided to help cities and counties analyze traffic statistics.

No one was going to pay Gates and Allen for this service when the feds would do it for nothing. Their contracts in Canada were not enough to keep the business going. At one point, they even considered selling Traf-O-Data machines to a firm in Brazil, but the deal fell through. With their company on the skids, Gates and Allen began having long telephone discussions about what they should do next. Allen decided he would join his friend after Gates completed his first year. They would work together and “brainstorm” about future projects. Much to his parents’ dismay, Gates was even thinking about dropping out of Harvard. He and Allen were serious about starting their own computer company, he told his parents. That summer of 1974, Gates interviewed for a job at various places around Boston, including Honeywell, one of the so-called Seven Dwarfs that made mainframe computers in the shadow of Snow White—mighty IBM. A manager at Honeywell who interviewed Gates telephoned Allen in Seattle.

“I’ve just seen this friend of yours, and he really impressed me with his abilities,” the guy told Allen. “We’d like to offer you a job, too. Come on out to Boston and we’ll finalize the deal.”

Allen packed up his Chrysler New Yorker and headed east, driving across the country in three days to join Gates. But when Allen got to Boston, he was in for a surprise. He went to Honeywell dressed in his best suit to talk with the manager who had called him in Seattle. “That was a great discussion we had on the phone,” the man told a startled Allen, “but we really didn’t offer you a job.” It took some tense negotiating, but Allen got the job. He and Gates worked together at Honeywell for the rest of the summer.

Gates and Allen were convinced the computer industry was about to reach critical mass, and when it exploded it would usher in a technological revolution of astounding magnitude. They were on the threshold of one of those moments when history held its breath . . . and jumped, as it had done with the development of the car and the airplane. Computer power was about to come to the masses. Their vision of a computer in every home was no longer a wild dream. “It’s going to happen,” Allen kept telling his friend. And they could either lead the revolution or be swept along by it. Allen was much more eager to start a company than Gates, who was worried about the reaction from his family if he dropped out of school.

“Paul kept saying, let’s start a company, let’s do it,” Gates recalled. “Paul saw that the technology was there. He kept saying, ‘It’s gonna be too late. We’ll miss it.’ ”

For a while, they considered building their own computer. Allen was more interested in computer hardware than Gates, whose interest was pure software—the “soul” of The Machine. As a boy, Allen had read electronics magazines and built radio and shortwave sets. He had worked with vacuum tubes, transistors, and finally with integrated circuits when he helped design the Traf-O-Data machine. But that experience also taught him what it took to build a computer. He and Gates soon abandoned the idea. They decided to stick with what they knew best—software. Building a computer was too hair-raising.

“We saw that hardware was a black art,” Allen said. “That was not our area of expertise. Our forte was software.”

By the fall of 1974, Gates had decided he would remain in school. The time just wasn’t right to start their company. Allen stayed on at Honeywell while Gates returned to Harvard to begin his sophomore year.

Gates landed in Currier House, where he roomed with his friend Andy Braiterman. These residential houses at Harvard, each with its own dining facility, are modeled after the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities. Gates’ former roommate, Znaimer, ended up at North House, about a hundred yards from Currier House.