The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 84

One day Allen, who came from a more modest background (his father was a library administrator at the University of Washington), visited Gates at his home and was awed. “His parents subscribed to Fortune and Bill read it religiously.” When Gates asked him what he thought it would be like to run a big company, Allen said he had no clue. “Maybe we’ll have our own company someday,” Gates declared.¹⁵

One trait that differentiated the two was focus. Allen’s mind would flit among many ideas and passions, but Gates was a serial obsessor. “Where I was curious to study everything in sight, Bill would focus on one task at a time with total discipline,” said Allen. “You could see it when he programmed—he’d sit with a marker clenched in his mouth, tapping his feet and rocking, impervious to distraction.”¹⁶

On the surface, Gates could come across as both a nerd and a brat. He had a confrontational style, even with teachers, and when he was angry would throw a tantrum. He was a genius, knew it, and flaunted it. “That’s stupid,” he would tell classmates and teachers alike. Or he would escalate the insult to be “the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard” or “completely brain dead.” At one point he laughed at a kid in class for being slow in figuring something out, causing a popular kid sitting in front of Gates to turn around and grab him by the buttoned-up collar and threaten to pummel him. The teacher had to step in.

But to those who knew him, Gates was more than merely nerdy or bratty. Intense and whip smart, he also had a sense of humor, loved adventures, took physical risks, and liked to organize activities. At sixteen he got a new red Mustang (he still had it more than forty years later, preserved in the garage of his mansion), and he took it on high-speed joy rides with his friends. He also brought his pals to his family compound on the Hood Canal, where he would kite-ski on a thousand-foot line behind a speedboat. He memorized James Thurber’s classic story “The Night the Bed Fell” for a student performance, and he starred in a production of Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy. Around that time, he started informing people, in a matter-of-fact way, that he would make a million dollars before he turned thirty. He woefully underestimated himself; at age thirty he would be worth $350 million.

THE LAKESIDE PROGRAMMING GROUP

In the fall of 1968, when Gates was entering eighth grade, he and Allen formed the Lakeside Programming Group. Partly it was a geek’s version of a gang. “At bottom, the Lakeside Programming Group was a boys’ club, with lots of one-upmanship and testosterone in the air,” said Allen. But it quickly morphed into a moneymaking business, and a competitive one at that. “I was the mover,” declared Gates. “I was the guy who said, ‘Let’s call the real world and try to sell something to it.’?”¹⁷ As Allen later noted with a bit of an edge, “While we were all bent on showing our stuff, Bill was the most driven and competitive, hands down.”¹⁸

The Lakeside Programming Group included two other denizens of the school’s computer room. Ric Weiland, who was in Allen’s tenth-grade class, was an altar boy at the local Lutheran church whose father was a Boeing engineer. Two years earlier, he had made his first computer in his basement. He looked much different from the other obsessives holed up in the computer room. Strikingly handsome, square jawed, tall, and muscular, he was coming to grips with the fact that he was gay, which was difficult to be open about in a conservative high school in the 1960s.

The other partner was Kent Evans, who was in Gates’s eighth-grade class. The son of a Unitarian minister, he was gregarious and unfailingly friendly, with a lopsided but winning smile that came from being born with a cleft palate that had been surgically repaired. He was utterly fearless and uninhibited, whether it was cold-calling grown-up executives or climbing rocky cliffs. He had made up the name Lakeside Programming Group as a way to get free material from the companies that advertised in electronics magazines. He also loved business, and he and Gates read each issue of Fortune magazine together. He became Gates’s best friend. “We were going to conquer the world,” said Gates. “We used to talk on the phone forever. I still remember his phone number.”¹⁹

The Lakeside Programming Group’s first job came that fall of 1968. Some engineers from the University of Washington had formed a little time-sharing company, housed in an abandoned Buick dealership, called the Computer Center Corporation and nicknamed C-Cubed. They bought a DEC PDP-10—a versatile mainframe that was destined to become a workhorse of the burgeoning time-sharing industry and Gates’s favorite machine—with the plan of selling time on it to customers, such as Boeing, who would hook in via Teletype and phone lines. One of the partners at C-Cubed was a Lakeside mother who came up with an offer for Gates’s gang that was like asking a posse of third-graders to be tasters in a chocolate factory. The mission: to drive the new PDP-10 as hard as they could and as long as they wanted, programming and playing on it nights and weekends, to see what things they could do to make it crash. C-Cubed’s deal with DEC was that it would not have to make lease payments for the machine until it was debugged and stable. DEC had not counted on its being tested by the pubescent hot-rodders of the Lakeside Programming Group.

There were two rules: whenever they crashed the machine, they had to describe what they had done, and they couldn’t do the same trick again until they were told to. “They brought us in like we were monkeys to find bugs,” Gates recalled. “So we would push the machine to the max in these totally brute-force ways.” The PDP-10 had three magnetic tapes, and the Lakeside boys would get all of them spinning at once and then try to crash the system by launching a dozen or so programs to grab as much memory as they could. “It was goofy stuff,” Gates said.²⁰ In return for performing their shakedown cruise, they got to use all the time they wanted to write programs of their own. They created a Monopoly game with random-number generators to roll the dice, and Gates indulged his fascination with Napoleon (also a math wizard) by concocting a complex war game. “You’d have these armies and you’d fight battles,” Allen explained. “The program kept getting bigger and bigger, and finally when you stretched it all out, it was like fifty feet of Teletype paper.”²¹

The boys would take the bus to C-Cubed and spend evenings and weekends hunkered down in the terminal room. “I became hard-core,” Gates boasted. “It was day and night.” They would program until they were starving, then walk across the street to a hippie hangout called Morningtown Pizza. Gates became obsessed. His room at home was strewn with clothes and Teletype printouts. His parents tried to impose a curfew, but it didn’t work. “Trey got so into it,” his father recalled, “that he would sneak out the basement door after we went to bed and spend most of the night there.”²²

The C-Cubed executive who became their mentor was none other than Steve “Slug” Russell, the creative and wry programmer who as a student at MIT had created Spacewar. The torch was being passed to a new generation of hackers. “Bill and Paul thought crashing the machine was so fun that I had to keep reminding them they weren’t supposed to do it again until we told them so,” Russell said.²³ “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.”²⁴ What particularly amazed Russell was Gates’s ability to associate different types of error with specific programmers back at DEC headquarters. A typical bug report from Gates read, “Well, Mr. Faboli’s code at this line, he’s made the same mistake of not checking the semaphore when he’s changing the status. If we simply insert this line here, we can get rid of this problem.”²⁵