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

hands on concerning computers and how to communicate with them, often teaching himself as he went. The faculty knew next to nothing about computers. Gates and the other kids hanging out day and night in the computer room were pretty much on their own.
    “We were off in our own world,” Gates recalled later. “Nobody quite understood the thing but us. I wanted to figure out exactly what it could do.”
    This insatiable appetite for computer time was very expensive. Within weeks, most of the $3,000 raised by the Mothers Club was gone. Eventually, parents were asked to help pay Lakeside’s mounting bills from General Electric.
    Gates’ first computer program, a series of instructions telling the computer what to do, was a tick-tack-toe game. He then wrote a program for a lunar lander game, which required the user to make a soft landing on the moon before expending all fuel in the spacecraft and crashing on the moon’s surface. (This game would prove somewhat prophetic. The Apollo 11 lunar lander carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had only seconds of fuel remaining when it landed on the Sea of Tranquility, July 20, 1969.) As his programming skills developed, Gates taught the computer to play Monopoly™, commanding it to play thousands of games in search of winning strategies.
    These early programs were written in a computer language known as BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.) It was developed by two Dartmouth College professors in 1964 under a grant from the National Science Foundation to teach their students an easier way to use computers. Gates was particularly interested in the mathematical foundations of computer science, the strange new binary world in which one communicated with the computer using only two words—usually designated zero and one. Gates talked about this relationship between computers and mathematics in the book Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers:
    “Most great programmers have some mathematical background, because it helps to have studied the purity of proving theorems, where you don’t make soft statements, you only make precise statements. In mathematics, you develop complete characterizations, and you have to combine theorems in very nonobvious ways. You often have to prove that a problem can be solved in less time. Math relates very directly to programming, maybe more so in my mind than in other people’s minds, because that’s the angle that I came from. I think there is a very natural relationship between the two.”
    Gates had always been very good at math. In fact, he was gifted. On the math achievement test Lakeside gave its students, Gates was the number one student in the school. He later scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of his college boards.
    While at Lakeside, he took advanced math courses at the University of Washington. “I read ahead in math, so I really didn’t spend much time on math classes in school. Even when I got bad grades in everything else, which was up through the eighth grade, I always did well in math.”
    Fred Wright, chairman of the math department at Lakeside when Gates attended, said of Gates, “He could see shortcuts through an algebraic problem or a computer problem. He could see the simplest way to do things in mathematics. He’s as good an analytical mathematician as I’ve worked with in all my years of teaching. But Bill was really good in all areas, not just math. He’s got a lot of breadth. It’s one of the unusual things about him.”
    Wright was in charge of the computer room in the Upper School, and has been given much of the credit for cultivating Lakeside’s first crop of computer talent in the spring of 1968. He nourished, encouraged, and befriended not only Gates and Allen but a handful of others, including Marc McDonald, Richard Weiland, and Chris Larson, three of the first programmers hired to work for Microsoft.
    “You have to understand what early age compulsions are like. They are