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

preparing to send astronauts to the moon, a technological feat made possible by the development of the computer. Lakeside had decided to expose its students to this new and exciting world of computers. The question was how to buy a computer on a school budget, even the budget of a well-to-do private school. The “Giant Brain” mainframe computers of the day cost millions of dollars and were out of reach bf all but the government, universities, and the largest corporations. Digital Equipment Corporation, better known as DEC, had recently begun marketing a minicomputer, but even this refrigerator-size machine was out of reach of the Lakeside budget. So the school bought itself a relatively inexpensive teletype machine. For a fee, users could type commands on the teletype and communicate via telephone line with a PDP-10 minicomputer in downtown Seattle (PDP stands for Program Data Processor). The PDP-10, one in a series of very famous computers built by Digital Equipment Corporation, would play a significant role in Gates’ development as a computer programmer. The PDP-10 Lakeside used was owned by General Electric, which billed Lakeside for “computer time” used by its students. And computer time was very costly.
    A group of mothers, the Lakeside Mothers Club, held a rummage sale to buy computer time and raised about $3,000, figuring the amount would be enough to last the rest of the school year. What they didn’t realize was how seductive a mistress The Machine would become to a few precocious boys who liked math and science. Bill Gates and Evans were about to develop a very expensive addiction.
    Lakeside became one of the first schools in the country with computer capability. The computer room soon became a powerful magnet for several of Lakeside’s brightest students, especially Gates. Before long, the teletype would be his umbilical cord to a new and exciting universe.
    Gates was in Paul Stocklin’s math class when he got his first peek at the computer room. One spring day, Stocklin took his entire math class over to the Upper School to see it. Under Stocklin’s supervision, Gates typed in a few instructions and watched in awe as the teletype, after communicating with the PDP-10 several miles away, typed back the response. It was better than science fiction.
    “I knew more than he did for the first day, but only for that first day,” said Stocklin, who now chairs the Lakeside math department. “We were really winging it ... . None of us knew anything back then. This thing wasn’t like a Macintosh.”
    Gates was immediately hooked. Whenever he had free time, he would run over to the Upper School to get more experience on the system. But Gates was not the only computer-crazed kid at Lakeside. He found he had to compete for time on the computer with a handful of others who were similarly drawn to the room as if by a powerful gravitational force. Among them was a soft-spoken, Upper School student by the name of Paul Allen, who was two years older than Gates.
    Seven years later, the two classmates would form Microsoft, the most successful startup company in the history of American business.
    When Albert Einstein was four or five years old and sick in bed, his father gave him a magnetic pocket compass. In his Autobiographical Notes, written 60 years later, Einstein described the compass as “a wonder.” It may well have determined the direction of his life as a theoretical physicist. “That this needle behaved in such a determined way did not at all fit into the nature of events,” he wrote. “I can still remember—at least I believe I can still remember—that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me.”
    Bill Gates undoubtedly cannot explain why he reacted as he did to his own “wonder,” the computer. But it triggered a deep passion, an obsession, in him. From that first day in the small computer room at Lakeside, its pull on him was inexorable.
    Gates devoured everything he could get his