The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 83

Unlike the computer pioneers before him, Gates, who was born in 1955, had not grown up caring much about the hardware. He had never gotten his thrills by building Heathkit radios or soldering circuit boards. A high school physics teacher, annoyed by the arrogance Gates sometimes displayed while jockeying at the school’s timesharing terminal, had once assigned him the project of assembling a Radio Shack electronics kit. When Gates finally turned it in, the teacher recalled, “solder was dripping all over the back” and it didn’t work.²

For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software code. “We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed building a machine. “What we know is software.” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders. “Hardware,” he admitted, “was not our area of expertise.”³

What Gates and Allen set out to do on that December day in 1974 when they first saw the Popular Electronics cover was to create the software for personal computers. More than that, they wanted to shift the balance in the emerging industry so that the hardware would become an interchangeable commodity, while those who created the operating system and application software would capture most of the profits. “When Paul showed me that magazine, there was no such thing as a software industry,” Gates recalled. “We had the insight that you could create one. And we did.” Years later, reflecting on his innovations, he said, “That was the most important idea that I ever had.”⁴

BILL GATES

The rocking motion that Gates exhibited when reading the Popular Electronics article had been a sign of his intensity since childhood. “As a baby, he used to rock back and forth in his cradle himself,” recalled his father, a successful and gentle lawyer. His favorite toy was a springed hobbyhorse.⁵

Gates’s mother, a respected civic leader from a prominent Seattle banking family, was known for her strong will, but she soon found that she was no match for her son. Often when she would summon him to dinner from his basement bedroom, which she had given up trying to make him clean, he wouldn’t answer. “What are you doing?” she once demanded.

“I’m thinking,” he shouted back.

“You’re thinking?”

“Yes, Mom, I’m thinking,” he replied. “Have you ever tried thinking?”

She sent him to a psychologist, who turned him on to books about Freud, which he devoured, but was unable to tame his attitude. After a year of sessions, he told Gates’s mother, “You’re going to lose. You had better just adjust to it because there’s no use trying to beat him.” His father recounted, “She came around to accepting that it was futile trying to compete with him.”⁶

Despite such occasional rebellions, Gates enjoyed being part of a loving and close-knit family. His parents and his two sisters liked lively dinner table conversations, parlor games, puzzles, and cards. Because he was born William Gates III, his grandmother, an avid bridge player (and basketball star), dubbed him Trey, the card term for a 3, which became his childhood nickname. Along with family friends, they spent much of the summer and some weekends at a collection of cabins on the Hood Canal near Seattle, where the kids engaged in a “Cheerio Olympics” featuring a formal opening ceremony with torchlight parade followed by three-legged races, egg tosses, and similar games. “The play was quite serious,” his father recalled. “Winning mattered.”⁷ It was there that Gates, at age eleven, negotiated his first formal contract; he drew up and signed a deal with one of his sisters giving him the nonexclusive but unlimited right to use her baseball glove for $5. “When Trey wants the mitt, he gets it” was one of the provisions.⁸

Gates tended to shy away from team sports, but he became a serious tennis player and water-skier. He also worked assiduously on perfecting fun tricks, such as being able to leap out of a trash can without touching the rim. His father had been an Eagle Scout (you could see in him throughout his life all twelve virtues of the Scout law), and young Bill in turn became an avid Scout, achieving Life Rank but falling three badges short of becoming an Eagle. At one jamboree he demonstrated how to use a computer, but that was before you could earn a badge for computing skill.⁹

Despite all these wholesome activities, Gates’s extreme intellect, big glasses, skinny frame, squeaky voice, and wonkish style—shirt often buttoned to the neck—made him come across as seriously nerdy. “He was a nerd before the term was even invented,” one teacher declared. His intellectual intensity was legendary. In fourth grade his science class was assigned a five-page paper, and he turned in thirty pages. That year he checked “scientist” when asked to select his future occupation. He also won a dinner atop Seattle’s Space Needle by memorizing and reciting perfectly the Sermon on the Mount in a contest run by his family’s pastor.¹⁰

In the fall of 1967, when Gates was just turning twelve but still looked about nine, his parents realized that he would be better off in a private school. “We became concerned about him when he was ready for junior high,” said his father. “He was so small and shy, in need of protection, and his interests were so very different from the typical sixth grader’s.”¹¹ They chose Lakeside, which had an old brick campus that looked like a New England prep school and catered to the sons (and soon daughters) of Seattle’s business and professional establishment.

A few months after he entered Lakeside, his life was transformed by the arrival of a computer terminal in a small downstairs room of the science and math building. It was not actually a true computer but instead a Teletype terminal that was connected by a phone line to a General Electric Mark II time-sharing computer system. The Lakeside Mothers Club, with $3,000 in proceeds from a rummage sale, had bought the right to use a block of time on the system at $4.80 per minute. It would turn out that they woefully underestimated how popular, and expensive, this new offering would be. When his seventh-grade math teacher showed him the machine, Gates was instantly hooked. “I knew more than he did for that first day,” the teacher recalled, “but only that first day.”¹²

Gates began going to the computer room whenever he could, every day, with a hard-core group of friends. “We were off in our own world,” he remembered. The computer terminal became to him what a toy compass had been to the young Einstein: a mesmerizing object that animated his deepest and most passionate curiosities. In struggling to explain what he loved about the computer, Gates later said it was the simple beauty of its logical rigor, something that he had cultivated in his own thinking. “When you use a computer, you can’t make fuzzy statements. You make only precise statements.”¹³

The language the computer used was BASIC, Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, which had been developed a few years earlier at Dartmouth to allow nonengineers to write programs. None of Lakeside’s teachers knew BASIC, but Gates and his friends inhaled the forty-two-page manual and became wizards at it. Soon they were teaching themselves more sophisticated languages, such as Fortran and COBOL, but BASIC remained Gates’s first love. While still in middle school, he produced programs that played tic-tac-toe and converted numbers from one mathematical base to another.

Paul Allen was two years ahead of Gates and physically far more mature (he could even grow sideburns) when they met in the Lakeside computer room. Tall and socially gregarious, he was not a typical wonk. He was immediately amused and charmed by Gates. “I saw a gangly, freckle-faced eighth-grader edging his way into the crowd around the Teletype, all arms and legs and nervous energy,” Allen recalled. “His blond hair went all over the place.” The two boys bonded and would often work late into the evening in the computer room. “He was really competitive,” Allen said of Gates. “He wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent.”¹⁴