Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (4 page)

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 all-consuming,” said the Reverend Marvin Evans, Kent’s father. “After Lakeside got that computer, Bill and Kent were in constant trouble with the faculty. Some of Kent’s journals demonstrate this. Everything was late—chemistry workbooks were late, physics workbooks were late, history and English themes were late.”

Wright, amused by the antics of his young charges, adopted the code name, “GYMFLKE,” to log on to the computer, an inside joke on Gates, Evans, and some of the others who “flaked out” of gym to work on The Machine. While the kids all became experts at finding confidential user passwords and breaking computer security systems, none of them, Gates included, discovered Wright’s secret password.

Although Gates was only in the lower school, before long some of the older boys were coming to him for help with the computer. Among them was Paul Allen, who would egg Gates on, challenging him to solve a difficult problem.

“Paul thought I had this attitude like I understood things,” Gates said. “So when he got stuck he would say, ‘Hey, I bet you can’t figure this out!’ He would kind of challenge me . . . and it was pretty hard stuff.”

As they spent more and more time together in the computer room, Gates and Allen became friends. One day, Gates went to Allen’s home, only to be amazed by Allen’s collection of sci-fi books.

“He had read four times as much as I had,” recalled Gates. “And he had all these other books that explained things. So I would ask him, ‘How do guns work? How do nuclear reactors work?’ Paul was good at explaining stuff. Later, we did some math stuff and physics stuff together. That’s how we got to be friends.” .

It wasn’t surprising that Allen should be well read. For more than twenty years his father, Kenneth Allen, was associate director of libraries for the University of Washington.

Although Allen could be just as intense and competitive as Gates, he was surprisingly soft-spoken, with an equally soft handshake. Allen talks so softly, in fact, that when reporters interview him, his voice sometimes fails to automatically activate their tape recorders.

The other kids at Lakeside liked Paul Allen. To many of his classmates, he seemed more personable than some of the others who had taken over the computer room. It was easy to like the boy with the blond Fu Manchu mustache and aviator sunglasses who habitually carried a briefcase. There was no pretentiousness in Allen, none of the I’m-smarter-than-you attitude.

“Paul was cool,” said a classmate who was not one of the computer room crowd. “He was a nerd who didn’t look like a nerd. He was always more approachable and friendlier than Bill. . . . You would run into him in the hallways and he would actually stop and talk to you.”

Allen and Gates not only spent a lot of time working together in the computer room but also a lot of time talking about the future of computer technology.

“We both were fascinated with the different possibilites of what you could do with computers,” Allen said. “It was a vast

area of knowledge we were trying to absorb. . . . Bill and I always had big dreams of what we could do with computers.” While Allen liked to read magazines like
Popular Electronics,
Gates read the business magazines that came into his family’s home. As a prelude to doing business in the “real world,” Gates and Allen formed the Lakeside Programmers Group, along with two of their friends, Richard Weiland and Kent Evans. Weiland and Allen were in the tenth grade, while Gates and Evans were in the eighth grade. The Lakeside Programmers Group was dedicated to finding money-making opportunities to use The Machine in the real world.

“I was the mover,” Gates said. “I was the guy who said, ‘Let’s call the real world and try to sell something to it.’ ”

As it turned out, the real world called them first. And what a deal it was—all the free computer time they wanted.

Founded by four University of Washington computer experts in the fall of 1968 with the backing of several Seattle investors, Computer Center Corporation was a private Seattle firm offering the largest concentration of timesharing computer power on the West Coast. The company (which Gates referred to as “C-Cubed”) had leased several computers from Digital Equipment Corporation, including a PDP-10 like the one Gates and the other Lakeside students used.

Computer Center Corporation attempted to sell its timesharing services to scientific and engineering businesses in the region—or any other customer in need of computer power at an affordable price.

One of the firm’s founders and chief scientific programmer, Monique Rona, had a son in the eighth grade at Lakeside—the same grade as Gates. She knew about the school’s teletype machine and its deal with General Electric for computer time. A representative from her company contacted Lakeside to inquire whether the school would be interested in making a similar arrangement with Computer Center Corporation. The students would have an even greater opportunity to learn about computers, the representative argued.

Lakeside concurred, and once again asked parents to help pay for the computer time used by their sons.

Gates and some of the other boys soon discovered all kinds of “neat” programs hidden in the C-Cubed PDP-10 software— programs they had not encountered with the General Electric computer. One trick the boys learned was something called “detach and leave job running.” This meant that even though they were logged off the system, the machine was still working on their program . . . and keeping a record of the computing time used. Computer bills soon ran into the hundreds of dollars.

“These kids were very hungry for time,” recalled Dick Wilkinson, one of the partners who organized Computer Center Corporation. “Every time we would get a new version of software, they would go poking around in the system, and we would have to forgive some bills because they would be running programs they were not supposed to. They found chess on the system, when they should not have. So they would play a half game of chess, and then leave the Lakeside terminal and go off to class or something. They didn’t understand they were using computer time like it was going out of style.”

The electronic mischief eventually got out of hand. Gates and a couple other boys broke the PDP-10 security system and obtained access to the company’s accounting files. They found their personal accounts and substantially reduced the amount of the time the computer showed they had used. They were quite proud of this ingenious accomplishment—until they got caught.

Wilkinson drove out to Lakeside for a talk with Fred Wright, the math teacher in charge of the school’s computer project. Like naughty boys, Gates and the others were marched into the principal’s office.

“We told them they were off the system for six weeks,” Wilkinson said, “and if we caught them on it we would call the police, because what they were doing was illegal. They were all very contrite. They were pretty good kids from then on.” Gates became even more of a problem for Computer Center Corporation shortly afterward. The very first BASIC program Gates wrote using the PDP-10 computer at C-Cubed was called “Bill.” The next time Gates dialed up the computer and tried to load his program, however, the system crashed.

Gates tried it again the next day. “New or old program?” the computer asked via the teletype machine.

Gates punched out the answer on the teletype keyboard: “Old program.”

The computer then asked, “Old program name?”

Gates punched out the answer: “Old program name is Bill.” Bam! Just like that, the system crashed again. Gates attempted to load up his program several times over the next few days, and each time the G-Cubed computer would break down.

This was not good news for Computer Center Corporation, which was trying to pay bills, attract new customers, and keep old ones. Whenever the computer went down, other paying customers were also knocked off the system. Worse, the computer “lost” everything it had been working on—a case of electronic Alzheimer’s. When the machine came back up, its memory banks were blank.

Frustrated programmers at C-Cubed eventually figured out what Gates was doing wrong. When the computer asked him the name of his program, he was supposed to type only the word, “Bill.” The string of characters he was typing, “Old program name is Bill,” was too long for the machine, an anomaly that caused it to crash.

It was an exhilarating feeling for Gates, knowing he could single-handedly bring down the huge computer by typing a string of letters. He soon learned, however, just how easy it was to crash the PDP-10.

The software that Digital Equipment Corporation supplied with its PDP-10 was “flaky” at best. On good days, the C-Cubed system might stay up four hours before crashing. On bad days, when there were lots of paying customers on line, it was usually down within half an hour. Clearly, something would have to be done if the firm were going to stay in business.

“We knew we had this reliability problem,” recalled Steve Russell, one of the programmers working for C-Cubed. “We knew how to turn the crashes on and off to some extent . . . simply by having lots of users and not having lots of users. What we wanted to do was get a herd of friendly users that we could turn on and off, so that we could turn them on to test the system and turn them off when we wanted the system to be reliable, because there were paying customers on the machines making money for us.”

So the company hired a herd of friendly users, and they became the unofficial “night shift.” C-Cubed offered Gates and the other Lakeside computer junkies an opportunity to try to crash the system. In exchange, they would get all the free computer time they wanted. They were simply to come down to C- Cubed in the evening and on weekends, after the paying customers were off the computer, log onto the system and have fun. The only requirement was that they were to carefully document each “bug” they found that caused the system to crash.

Computer bugs were appropriately named. In August of 1945, while working on an experimental computer known as the Mark 1 at Harvard University, a circuit malfunctioned, and a research assistant went looking for the problem in the tangled mess of vacuum tubes and wires. He found the problem, and removed it with a pair of tweezers—it was a 2-inch long moth.

“From then on,” Grace Hopper, a member of the Mark 1 research team, told
Time
magazine in 1984, “when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.” (The famous moth is preserved at the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia.)

Finding bugs in the C-Cubed computer system proved to be a fertile field of investigation for Gates and the other boys. They were given what became known as the “Problem Report Book,” a journal of their discoveries and investigations. Over the next six months, the “bug” book grew to more than 300 pages. Most of the entries were made by just two boys—Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Computer Center Corporation was located in the city’s University District, in what had been an old Buick dealership. After school, Gates would rush home to Laurelhurst for dinner, then run to nearby Children’s Hospital to catch the No. 30 bus for the short ride to C-Cubed.

It was often past midnight when the boys finished their work. Gates would usually walk home. Sometimes, one of the parents would come by and drive all the boys home.

“It was when we got free time at C-Cubed that we really got into computers,” Gates said. “I mean, then I became hard core. It was day and night.”

At this point, Gates was 13 years old, and finishing up the eighth grade.

“We stayed up until all hours of the night. ... It was a fun time,” recalled Allen.

Gates and Allen not only looked for bugs but they also looked for any information that might help them learn more about computers, operating systems, and software. Allen would hoist Gates on garbage cans so he could poke around for important tidbits of information left behind by the “day shift.”

“I’d get the notes out with the coffee grounds on them and study the operating systems,” Gates said.

Kent Evans was often there late into the night with Gates and Allen, as was Rick Weiland. After four or five hours working in front of a computer, the boys would send out for pizza and Coke. It was a hacker’s heaven.

Occasionally, a tall, quiet, bearded fellow by the name of Gary Kildall dropped by in the evenings to use the computers and talk to some of the programmers. Kildall was finishing work on his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Washington. Ten years later, he would fumble one of the biggest business opportunities of the personal computer revolution and in the process help to make Bill Gates a very rich man.

The ground rules set down by C-Cubed for the night shift were pretty straightforward. The boys could use the system as much as they wanted, at no charge. They were encouraged to try to crash the system, and when it went down, they were to tell C-Cubed what they had input when it crashed. The deal was they could find any bug once, but only once. C-Cubed would then “de-bug” that part of the program.

“On occasion we had to give some verbal reprimands for violating our rules, which was using the same bug- more than once before we fixed it,” said Steve Russell. “Since we were giving them time, they had considerable motivation to play the game our way.”

Russell, in his early thirties, was there at night to ride herd on the boys.

“Usually, when I stuck my nose in on them, I’d get asked a question or five, and my natural inclination was to answer questions at considerable length,” he said. “They got some useful info from that.”

Steve Russell was famous as a computer programmer, and the kids eagerly plied him for information. Russell had gone to college at Dartmouth but left in 1958 to work as a computer programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where professor John McCarthy had set up an artifical intelligence research center in order to get funding from the federal government. It was McCarthy, an absent-minded professor and master mathematician who came up with the term “artificial intelligence,” or AI. He later went to Stanford’s AI research center on the West Coast, and Russell followed.

In 1961, using a PDP-1, the first in Digital’s PDP series of computers, Russell had hacked out the first computer video game called “Space Wars.” The PDP-1 had a CRT or cathode ray tube screen. Russell worked for hours just to produce a dot on the screen, which would be commanded to change directions and accelerate by flipping toggle switches on the front of the computer. Eventually, his game took shape—a battle in outer space involving two rocket ships, each with 31 torpedoes. (Russell was another big science fiction fan.) Random dots on the screen represented stars. A subsequent program turned the stars into constellations. Other hackers improved on his game. A player could jump into hyperspace with the flick of a switch.

Space Wars became the mother of all computer games. Before long, a generation of new games followed.

At Stanford, Russell worked on multi-user computer systems, using DEC s PDP-6. C-Cubed was created to take the next version of that multi-user system, the PDP-10, and make a commercial service out of it. Russell was recruited by the C-Cubed company from Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Research Center in late 1968 because of his experience with multi-user computer systems.

Russell sometimes gave Gates and Allen computer manuals, with instructions to return them the next morning. Instead of going home, the boys would remain at C-Cubed all night reading.

Gates and Allen stood out from the other kids, Russell recalled, because of their enthusiasm. “They also seemed to have a lot more interest in breaking the system than the others.” Gates earned a reputation at C-Cubed as an expert in the art of breaking into other computer security systems. He was particularly good at finding a bug known as the “one liner.” This was a pathological string of characters that could be typed on one line, allowing Gates to take over the system or cause it to crash. Legend has it that Gates was severely reprimanded at C-Cubed for breaking into security systems. However, other than the one time he altered his account from Lakeside, those stories are apocryphal. The company encouraged Gates and the other boys to try to poke around in files they were not supposed to be able to get into. After all, C-Cubed couldn’t fix a security leak unless it knew about it. Digital had supplied an elaborate security system with the PDP-10, for which the C-Cubed staff added a few bells and whistles of their own. They wanted to know if someone was able to get past the security system, and they were more than happy to have Gates try to do this. He did so with the knowledge and permission of C-Cubed.