Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (8 page)

Clearly, Gates was confused about his academic future. He would later say that he spent many hours sitting in his room “being a philosophical depressed guy, trying to figure out what I was doing with my life.” He started playing poker. Lots of poker. This great American game of riverboat gamblers and U.S. presidents became as all-consuming to Gates as computers. He put the same intensity into his poker playing as he did anything else that mattered. When he first started playing poker, Gates was terrible. But he was very determined, and eventually became a pretty good player. “Bill had a monomaniacal quality,” said Braiterman, his roommate. “He would focus on something and really stick with it. He had a determination to master whatever it was he was doing. Perhaps it’s silly to compare poker and Microsoft, but in each case, Bill was sort of deciding where he was going to put his energy and to hell with what anyone else thought.”

This was serious poker the boys played, not a friendly penny-ante family game. It was not unusual for players to win or lose several hundred dollars a night. A $2,000 loss was not unheard of. The game of choice was Seven Card Stud, high-low split, meaning the player with the best poker hand splits the pot with the player with the worst hand.

The games were played nightly in Currier House in a room that was hardly ever used for anything else. It became known as the “poker room.” Regulars at the table were some of the best and brightest at Currier House, including Tom Wolf, Greg Nelson, Scott Drill, and Brad Leithauser. Braiterman also played, although not nearly as much as his roommate. Other than Gates, none of the poker crowd went on to become billionaires, but they didn’t do badly, either. Wolf, known as the “Captain” of the games, is a mathematics professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Nelson is with Digital Equipment Corporation’s research center in Palo Alto. Drill is president of Varitronics Systems, an office machine firm in Minneapolis. Leithauser is a poet, author, and frequent contributor to
The New Yorker.
He teaches at Mt. Holyoke College. Braiterman is a top Wall Street tax attorney.

By most accounts, Gates became a good enough player to hold his own with this crowd. “He was a fine player—when he could pry himself away from his beloved PDP-10 computer,” recalled Nelson.

“I was good,” said Gates. “But what happened was that when we first started out, all these guys from the business school and the medical school would come in, and they weren’t very good. So we would raise the stakes, and people would lose their money and they would leave. Toward the end of the poker games at Harvard, it was guys who all we did full-time was play poker. By the very end, I was just able to hold my own.”

There were a few games that went on for 24 hours. Trying to break his addiction, Gates once gave Allen custody of his checkbook. Then he asked for it back.

Drill said he often got the best of Gates in big pots when they went
mano-a-mano.
Gates, he said, had a tendency to play out his hand to the costly end whenever he believed he had correctly “read” other players at the table. Because of this tendency, Drill would sometimes razz Gates. He came up with a nickname for Gates from a popular dog food commercial of the day. “Here comes the Gravy Train,” Drill would say, as Gates relentlessly threw more and more chips into the pot, refusing to fold his hand.

“My perception of Bill’s lifestyle, and it was a lot of people’s perception, was that he spent his time either playing poker or in the computer room,” recalled Drill.

One student at Currier House who heard all about Gates’ poker exploits was Steve Ballmer, who lived just down the hall. After a long night of gambling, Gates would sometimes drop by

Ballmer’s room to recount his adventures at the poker table. Ballmer was usually awake. He was able to go without sleep as long as Gates could. They had the same intensity level, the same unlimited energy source. They were on the same wavelength. In Gatesspeak, it’s known as “high bandwidth communication,” or the amount of information one can absorb. The two would often engage in heated debates, exchanging information at a high band rate like two computers connected by modem. A short while into most conversations, Gates and Ballmer would start rocking in sync, talking at the same time but hearing every word the other said.

Several years later, Gates would ask Ballmer to join him at the controls of the Microsoft joyride. He would become the second most influential person in the company, next to Chairman Bill.

Ballmer was much more social than Gates. He seemed to know everyone at Harvard. He convinced Gates to join the Men’s Club at Currier House. As an initiation rite, Gates was blindfolded, dressed in a tuxedo, and brought to the dining room table, where he was ordered to talk about computers.

Just as Gates wanted to be accepted as one of the boys back at Lakeside in Seattle, he also wanted to fit in at Harvard . . . to belong to a fraternity and be part of “the group.” But it wasn’t in his nature. Despite his association with the outgoing Ballmer, Gates was very much a loner with only a small group of friends. His shyness often came across as aloofness.

“Bill and Steve were polar opposites,” said Braiterman. “Bill was really not a social kind of guy. He was not the sort of person who hung out with a lot of people. I don’t mean he wasn’t social in the sense of being unfriendly or anything. He just wasn’t very outgoing. Steve was.”

Ballmer did not have the passion for computers or the technical background that Gates had, but he did share his interest in mathematics. Ballmer was working on a degree in applied mathematics. At one time in high school, Gates had thought about becoming a mathematician. It was one of many career possibilities. Now, at Harvard, he was having second thoughts as he sized up his competition. Still, he continued to take graduate-level math courses his sophomore year.

“He would sit in class without even a pad of paper, resting his head on his hands,” recalled Henry Leitner, who took a graduate math course with Gates on the theory of computations. “He would look very bored, then a half hour into a proof on the blackboard, Bill would raise his hand and blurt out, ‘You made a mistake, I’ll show you.’ Then he would trace the mistake back. He would stump the teacher. He seemed to take great joy in that.” Leitner, now a senior lecturer in computer science at Harvard, was a graduate student at the time. He and Gates sat next to each other in class, and were supposed to collaborate on homework problems. But Leitner couldn’t get the younger Gates to work on problems he didn’t think worthy of his time. Gates only liked the challenge of the most difficult problems. “I used to wonder what I was doing trying to work with this guy,” said Leitner. “He would only do about 20 percent of the work. But it was worth it. A couple minutes on the phone with him and he would straighten me out on a complex math problem. He was a real character.”

At Lakeside, Gates had been the best student in the school at math. Even at Harvard, he was one of the top math students. But he was not
the
best. He had met several students better than he was at math, including Fred Commoner, the son of scientist-author Barry Commoner. Gates eventually gave up any thoughts of becoming a mathematician. If he couldn’t be the best in his field, why risk failure?

“I met several people in the math department who were quite a bit better than I was at math,” said Gates. “It changed my view about going into math. You can persevere in the field of math and make incredible breakthroughs, but it probably discouraged me. It made the odds much longer that I could do some world-class thing. I had to really think about it: Hey, I’m going to sit in a room, staring at a wall for five years, and even if I come up with something, who knows. So it made me think about whether math was something I wanted to do or not. But there were so many choices. My mind was pretty much open.

I thought law would be fun. ... I thought physiological psychology—the study of the brain—would be fun. ... I thought working in artificial intelligence would be fun. ... I thought theoretical computer science would be fun. ... I really had not zeroed in on something. . . .”

It’s not well known outside a few of his professors, but Gates did make one small but noteworthy contribution in the field of mathematics while at Harvard. He helped advance the solution to a mathematical puzzle that had been around for some time. No one had come up with a definitive solution.

This was the puzzle, as it had appeared in several mathematical journals: “The chef in our place is sloppy, and when he prepares a stack of pancakes they come out all different sizes. Therefore, when I deliver them to a customer, on the way to the table I rearrange them (so that the smallest winds up on top, and so on, down to the largest at the bottom) by grabbing several from the top and flipping them over, repeating this (varying the number I flip) as many times as necessary. If there are “n” pancakes, what is the maximum number of flips (as a function of “n”) that I will ever have to use to rearrange them?”

Gates was assisted in his work on the puzzle by then Harvard professor Christos Papadimitriou, who taught computer science. Gates considered the math puzzle very similar to the kind of challenges he faced when working on a complicated computer program in which he had to design algorithms to solve a specific problem.

“This was a simple problem that had proved very stubborn,” said Papadimitriou. “Bill claimed to have a way of doing it better than anyone else, and I was patient enough to suffer through his long and ingenious explanation.” Later, Papadimitriou decided to write up Bill’s solution, and it was published in 1979 in the journal
Discrete Mathematics.
The breakthrough Gates made on the puzzle has remained on the cutting edge of the field for the past 15 or so years, according to Papadimitriou, who is now at the University of California in San Diego. The professor occasionally gives the puzzle to some of his students and tells them if they solve it, he will quit his job and work for them. “I should have done this with Bill,” he said.

Gates may not have been the best math student at Harvard, but he had no peers in computer science. His professors were impressed not only by his smarts, but his enormous energy.
There’s
one in a handful who come through in computer science that you know from the day they show up on the doorstep they will be very, very good,” said professor Tom Cheatham, director of the Center for Research and Computing Technology at Harvard. “No doubt, he was going to go places.”

Although Gates took several computer science classes from Cheatham, they did not like each other. “Gates had a bad personality and a great intellect,” recalled Cheatham. “In a place like Harvard, where there are a lot of bright kids, when you are better than your peers, some tend to be nice and others obnoxious. He was the latter.”

When Gates wasn’t playing poker at night, he was usually working in the Aiken Computer Center. That was when the machines were least used. Sometimes, an exhausted Gates would fall asleep on computer work tables instead of returning to his room at Currier House. “There were many mornings when I would find him dead asleep on the tables,” recalled Leitner, the graduate math student who was also interested in computers. “I remember thinking he was not going to amount to anything. He seemed like a hacker, a nerd. I knew he was bright, but with those glasses, his dandruff, sleeping on tables, you sort of formed that impression. I obviously didn’t see the future as clearly as he did.”

But Paul Allen saw the future. He may have seen it even more clearly than Gates.

On a cold winter day in December 1974, Allen was walking across Harvard Square in Cambridge on his way to visit Gates, when he stopped at a kiosk and spotted the upcoming January issue of
Popular Electronics,
a magazine he had read regularly since childhood. This issue, however, sent his heart pounding. On the cover was a picture of the Altair 8080, a rectangular metal machine with toggle switches and lights on the front. “World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models,” screamed the magazine cover headline.

“I bought a copy, read it, and raced back to Bill’s dorm to talk to him,” said Allen, who was still working at Honeywell in nearby Boston. “I told Bill, ‘Well here’s our opportunity to do something with BASIC.’ ”

He convinced his younger friend to stop playing poker long enough to finally do something with this new technology. Allen, a student of Shakespeare, was reminded of what the Bard himself wrote, in
Julius Caesar:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

Gates knew Allen was right. It was time. The personal computer miracle was going to happen.

It was named after a star and had only enough memory to hold about a paragraph’s worth of information. But the Altair, the people’s entry into the dazzling new world of computers, represented nearly 150 years of technological evolution and thought.

Although what we know as the modern computer had arrived some 30 years before the Altair, in the 1940s during World War II, the concept of such a machine came from the mind of an eccentric 19th century mathematical genius named Charles

Babbage, who developed the first reliable life-expectancy tables. In 1834, having already invented the speedometer and the cowcatcher for locomotives, Babbage put all his creative energies into the design of a steam-powered machine he called the “Analytical Engine.” Frustrated by inaccuracies he found in the mathematical tables of the day, Babbage wanted to build a machine to solve mathematical equations. On paper, his Analytical Engine consisted of thousands of gears and cogs turned by steam, and a logic center that Babbage called “the mill.” His design called for a machine the size of a football field. Such an undertaking also called for huge sums of money, and when the government stopped backing the project, Babbage was helped financially by Augusta Ada, the Countess of Lovelace and daughter of the poet Lord Byron. The beautiful and scientific- minded countess was a fine mathematician herself and is now considered the first computer programmer. The countess planned to use punch cards to instruct the Analytical Engine what to do. She got the idea from the cards used on Jacquard looms to determine the design on cloth. “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves,” she wrote.