Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (5 page)

“We wanted to know about these bugs so we could get rid of them,” Russell said.

Another programmer at C-Cubed, Dick Gruen, said, I would not call it breaking in if I said, ‘See if you can find a way around this.’ I’d call it asking people to see whether the watchman was doing his job. The distinction is they were not stealing anything from us, and they were doing it not just with our approval but on our behalf. We wanted them to tell us about holes

that they found.”

Despite the work of Gates, Allen, and the other kids from Lakeside, DEC continued to have problems with the multi-user software it used. It would take another seven years before all the bugs were gone. By then, C-Cubed was no longer in existence, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen were a lot more famous than Steve Russell.

Computer Center Corporation first began struggling in late 1969; in March of 1970 the company went out of business.

Gates was finishing up the ninth grade when C-Cubed went under. When it did, he made the first of what would be many smart, profitable deals while at Lakeside. In the process, he showed that when it came to business, he didn’t allow anything, even friendship, to stand in the way.

Without discussing the matter with Allen and Weiland, their partners in the Lakeside Programmers Group, Gates and Evans negotiated to buy the valuable DEC computer tapes from C- Cubed at a cut-rate price. They hid the tapes in the Lakeside teletype machine. When an angry Allen found out, he took the tapes. Gates and Evans threatened legal action, despite the fact that they were barely teenagers.

“There was definitely some tension there,” Allen said, “but it got resolved.” Gates and Evans eventually sold the tapes and made a nice profit.

Mary and Bill, Jr., were not pleased with such shenanigans. They became increasingly concerned about their son. The Machine seemed to them to have an almost supernatural hold on him. Although he was only in the ninth grade, he already seemed obsessed with the computer, ignoring everything else, staying out all night. Gates was turning into what MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum, in his book
Computer Power and Human Reason,
described as a computer bum:

‘Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pore like possessed students of a cabalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers. . .

Weizenbaum was describing young men at MIT in the late sixties, at the artificial intelligence lab. The passage in his book became infamous in computer circles. Hackers considered it unfounded and vicious. They saw the computer as a revolutionary tool that could change the world. But Weizenbaum considered it dehumanizing. Young men addicted to The Machine had no sense of limits, he said. They had tunnel vision, unable to see the real world.

Mary and Bill, Jr., were
beginning
to see this dehumanizing, addictive behavior in their son. Although they had never pushed him in any direction before, they did so now. They ordered him to give up computers, at least for a while.

“It was a combination of things,” Gates explained, “where people thought, hey, maybe we are out of control, and people thought we weren’t paying attention to anything else, and that it was a kind of abnormal situation. So my parents said, ‘Why don’t you give this stuff up.’ So I did.”

It was no big deal, he said. “I just went off and did some other stuff.. . science, math. There was an infinite amount to read. There was at least nine months there when I did nothing

with computers.”

Read he did, with the same kind of commitment he had made to computers. He consumed a number of biographies Franklin Roosevelt’s and Napoleon’s, among others—to understand, he said, how the great figures of history thought. He read business and science books, along with novels. His favorites were
Catcher in the Rye
and A
Separate Peace.
He would later recite long passages from those two books to girlfriends. Holden Caulfield, the main character in
Catcher in the Rye,
became one of his heroes.

And so Bill Gates, the biggest computer junkie in the Lakeside computer room, swore off computers for nearly a year, from the end of the ninth grade through the first half of the tenth. “I tried to be normal,” he said, “the best I could.”

As a student at Lakeside School, Bill Gates was never just one of the boys. His drive, intensity, attitude, and intelligence made him stand out from the crowd. In fact, nothing about Bill Gates was normal. Gates used to be teased at Lakeside because he was clearly so much brighter than the other students. Even in an environment like Lakeside, where smart kids tended to command respect, anyone as smart as Gates got teased by some of the others. In a school carpool, Gates, who was younger and smaller than the other boys, always sat in the back and was usually left out of conversations. Occasionally, he would attempt to win their approval by telling a joke. When he did, one older boy who always sat in the front usually turned around, put his hand in Gates face, spread his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, and with a smirk, told him, “Small man . . . small joke.”

After a nine month hiatus, Gates resumed his love affair with the computer. It didn’t take long for other students to notice that the same kids always seemed to crowd the small computer room at Lakeside. The floor was often littered with folded, spindled, or mutilated punch cards, and punched out pieces of teletype tape. The teletype was usually hammering away. Gates and his friends often sat at a long table, drinking from two-liter bottles of Coke, playing chess or the ancient Chinese game of Go to while away the time until the computer had finished the job it was running. With all the time he spent in the computer room, Gates became a master of Go and could beat anyone in the school.

“Gates mostly associated with the kids in the computer room,” recalled one classmate, who today is a prominent Seattle architect and community leader. “He was socially inept and uncomfortable around others. The guy was totally obsessed with his interest in computers. . . . You would see him playing tennis occasionally, but not much else. Initially I was in awe of Gates and the others in that room. I even idolized them to some extent. But I found that they were such turkeys that I didn’t want to be like them. They were part of the reason I got out of computer work. . . . They had developed very narrowly socially and they were arrogant, and I just didn’t want to be like that ”

By his junior year, Gates was something of a computer guru to the younger Lakeside computer hacks. He would often hold court in the computer room for hours, talking shop and telling stories about industry hackers and “phone phreaks like Captain Crunch, who had gained national notoriety by building so-called blue boxes, which allowed the user to make free long-distance phone calls. One of these computer groupies who came to hear Gates was Brad Augustine, four years his junior.

“He lived and breathed computers to the point he would forget to clip his fingernails,” Augustine recalled. “His nails would be a half an inch long. He was a slob in that sense, just so much into whatever he was doing.”

The school annual of his graduating year at Lakeside contains a picture of Gates lying on the table in the computer room, phone to his ear, ski cap pulled low over his head. “Who is this

man?” the caption asks.

“Bill stood out,” said one former classmate, who is now a successful businessperson. “Everyone knew who Bill Gates was.

I don’t think there was anyone in the school who didn t. There were nerd types that no one ever noticed, and there were nerd types that everyone knew. Bill fit that latter category. He looked like a little kid, for one thing. He looked much younger than he was. He was also incredibly obnoxious. He was also considered the brightest kid in school. If you had asked anybody at Lakeside, ‘Who is the real genius among geniuses?’ everyone would have said ‘Bill Gates.’ He was obnoxious, he was sure of himself, he was aggressively, intimidatingly smart. When people thought of Bill they thought, well, this guy is going to win a Nobel Prize. But he didn’t have any social graces. He just wasn’t a personable kind of person. He was one of those guys who knew he was smarter than everyone else and knew he was right

all the time.
...”

He had a hard-nosed, confrontational style even with his teachers—a style he is noted for today. His intensity at times simply boiled over into raw, unthrottled emotion, and occasionally childlike temper tantrums. Several former classmates vividly remember a volatile exchange between Gates and physics teacher Gary Maestretti in the tenth grade. The two were heatedly arguing with one another, jaw to jaw, in front of the class on a raised stage that was used for class demonstrations. Gates was yelling at the top of his lungs, waving his finger, hammering away at Maestretti, telling him he was wrong about a physics point . . . and Gates was winning the argument.

Maestretti, who now chairs the school’s science department, has no recollection of the argument, but he certainly remembers Gates, and his best friend Kent Evans.

Written work from Bill didn’t come across with a lot of polish, Maestretti said. “Kent Evans would produce copious explorations of things. Bill wasn’t one to produce a lot of writing. At one point Maestretti tried to encourage Gates to use his hands as well as his intellect. As a project, Maestretti asked him to assemble a Radio Shack electronics kit, in order to force him to build something correctly and make it work.

“I can remember when he brought it to me, telling me, ‘Okay, now I’ve satisfied my project.’ And of course solder was

dripping all over the back ” Needless to say, it didn’t work.

“He was clearly much more ethereal and intellectual than practical.
...”

The classroom, not the workshop, was Gates’ competitive arena, the intellectual battleground where he would strive for the best test score or compete to solve math and physics problems faster than anyone else. He was legendary in his classes for correctly answering trick questions-he almost always saw the hidden meaning or spotted the red herring thrown out by the teacher.

“He was always one step ahead,” said Carl Edmark, his childhood friend. “You couldn’t fool him.”

Gates was impatient with those not as quick as he was, teachers included. His science teacher, William Dougal, once commented, If a teacher was slow, Bill always seemed on the verge of saying, ‘But that’s
obvious.’
”

His superior attitude rubbed some of his classmates the wrong way. Colby Atwood, who was a year ahead of Gates, sat in front of Gates in a law class taught by lawyer Gary Little. Gates, at this point, was a junior. One day Gates laughed at a student who was slow to answer a question put to him by Little. When Atwood, who didn’t particularly care for Gates, heard him snicker at his friend, he turned around, grabbed Gates by his shirt, and told him off. Little had to jump in and break it up.

“It was a response not to just that one incident but to an attitude that Gates had had for some time in the class,” said Atwood. Atwood saw Gates again on a plane 20 years later, when Gates boarded at the last moment.

“He looked rumpled . . . tired . . . hair uncombed . . . just the way he used to look in school.”

While some classmates remember Gates as socially awkward and completely absorbed by the world of the Lakeside computer room, to those who knew him best Gates was hardly the social outcast he may have appeared to be from a distance. He had a sense of humor and adventure. He was a risk taker, a guy who liked to have fun and who was fun to be with. He had an immense range of knowledge and interests and could talk at length on

any number of subjects.

“Anyone who remembers him as a nerdy person either didn’t deal with him closely or is remembering wrong,” said friend Paul Carlson, whose passion was politics, not computers.

When he was 16, Gates bought a new, red 1970 Mustang that he and his friends would use to cut afternoon classes and go joy riding.

“He liked to drive fast,” recalled Peter Randlett, one of his friends who often went on the rides. He was a typical, privileged, adolescent kid who liked to goof off and take a break from the competitiveness of Lakeside. We would often just rap for hours.”

Other than Kent Evans, probably no one was closer to Gates in high school than Carl Edmark, his friend since the fourth grade. Throughout high school, Gates and Edmark did practically everything together—saw new movies, cruised in the Mustang, hung out at hamburger stands, and played endless games of pinball. On weekends in the summer months, they went water skiing on Hood Canal. They also learned to hang glide on Hood Canal behind a speedboat with a 1,000-foot tow line attached to a 16-foot kite.