Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire Read Online Free PDF Page A

business acumen, entrepreneurship, and luck. He would cut his first business deals at Lakeside, and form his first money-making company. He would develop lasting friendships with a handful of Lakeside computer whiz kids like himself, who would become the first to join him in his crusade to build a software empire.
    In 1967, students in the seventh and eighth grades made up the Lower School. The Upper School consisted of students in the ninth through twelfth grades. Those who started in the seventh grade and survived Lakeside’s academic pressure cooker until they graduated were called “lifers.” Trey Gates became a lifer.
    Until the 1960s, Lakeside was a very traditional prep school. Boys wore coats, ties, and wingtip shoes. The seniors had special privileges—only seniors, for example, could use the front doors or smoke. But with the Vietnam War came protest and change. The coats and ties came off, hair grew longer, and many of the boys started coming to school in beards, blue jeans, and army fatigue jackets.
    “The Sixties loosened up what had been a classic boys’ school,” recalled Robert Fulghum, the bestselling author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, who was an art teacher at Lakeside. Fulghum represented Lakeside’s alternative side. He was the kind of teacher who would show up for his class in a gorilla suit to illustrate a point, and whose exams included questions like, “Suppose all humans had tails. Describe yours.” Fulghum knew Gates fairly well, although the boy was never in any of his art classes.
    Lakeside always drew on the city’s big-money establishment. Many of the boys who had passed through the school over the years were the movers and shakers of the community. It was a fiercely competitive environment at every level. “Even the dumb kids were smart,” said one member of Gates’ graduating class of 1973. Among the students at Lakeside were the McCaw brothers, who together built a billion-dollar cellular phone empire.
    Although the school rewarded the marchers and the salu- ters, the students who really attracted attention were those who were unusual in some way. These kids got a lot of support and encouragement from the administration and faculty.
    “You could, if you looked at Lakeside superficially, think of it as an elitist school with high requirements and strictly focused on college preparation,” said Fulghum. “But in fact, it tended to look very, very carefully at individual students, especially ones who stuck out in any direction, and it would give those students lots and lots of privilege and rope and space to do whatever they could do, even if it was far out of the usual constraints of the school.”
    In that sense, Lakeside was extraordinary: it allowed students to develop their own interests, and Gates quickly did just that.
    There would come a time when every student in school knew his name, knew that he was the best of the best at Lakeside. But the only thing remarkable about Bill Gates when he began the seventh grade were his big feet. Although he was the smallest boy in the seventh grade, Gates wore size 13 wingtips. “We all wondered if he would grow into his feet,” a classmate recalled.
    Of all the friendships he would develop at Lakeside, none would be as strong or as close as his friendship with Kent Evans. The two were inseparable from the seventh grade. Both were gifted, both shared a passion for mathematics, and both would soon share an even greater passion for computers.
    Gates and Evans had very different personalities. While Gates could be cold and aloof like his father, Kent was warm and outgoing. A minister’s son with a harelip and thick black hair, there was a down-to-earth quality to Evans. Lakeside students would remember him as “the nicest boy in school.”
    Toward the end of Gates’ first year at Lakeside, in the early spring of 1968, the school made a decision that would prove decisive to Bill Gates’ future. America was