The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 86

That is when Evans, despite being exhausted, decided to go through with a mountain-climbing excursion he had signed up for. He was not an athlete. “It was really unusual that he signed up for this climbing course,” Gates recalled. “I think he wanted to push himself.” Evans’s father, knowing how drained his son was, begged him to cancel: “The last conversation I had with him was trying to convince him not to go, but he had a commitment to finishing things.” The class was learning how to belay on one of the more gentle slopes when Evans tripped. He tried to get up, then continued to roll more than two hundred yards across the snow and down a glacier, tucking in his arms to protect himself instead of splaying them out as he should have. His head smashed into several rocks, and he died aboard the helicopter that came to rescue him.

Lakeside’s headmaster called the Gates home, and Bill was summoned into his parents’ bedroom, where he was told the news.^I The service was conducted by Lakeside’s art teacher, Robert Fulghum, who was a Unitarian minister like Evans’s father and who would later become a popular writer (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten). “I had never thought of people dying,” Gates said. “At the service, I was supposed to speak, but I couldn’t get up. For two weeks I couldn’t do anything at all.” He spent a lot of time afterward with Kent’s parents. “Kent was the apple of their eye.”³⁴

Gates called Paul Allen, who had just finished his freshman year at Washington State, and asked him to come back to Seattle to help with the scheduling program. “I was going to do it with Kent,” Gates told him. “I need help.” He was in bad shape. “Bill stayed depressed for weeks,” Allen recalled.³⁵ They brought cots to campus and, like old times, spent many nights in the computer room that summer of 1972, communing with a PDP-10. With his rigorous mind, Gates was able to take the problem posed by the Rubik’s Cube of class-scheduling variables and break it into a series of small component problems that could be solved sequentially. He was also able to put himself into a history class with all the right girls and only one other boy (“a real wimp”) and make sure that he and his senior class friends had Tuesday afternoons free. They had T-shirts made featuring a beer keg and the words “Tuesday Club” emblazoned on the front.³⁶

That summer Gates and Allen became enchanted by Intel’s new 8008 microprocessor, a powerful upgrade of its 4004 “computer on a chip.” They were so excited by a story on it in Electronics Magazine that years later Gates would remember the page number it was on. If the chip really could act like a computer and be programmed, Allen asked Gates, why not write a programming language for it, specifically a version of BASIC? If they pulled off such a feat, Allen argued, “ordinary people would be able to buy computers for their offices, even their homes.” Gates dismissed the 8008 as not being up for such a task. “It would be dog-slow and pathetic,” he replied. “And BASIC by itself would take up almost all the memory. There’s just not enough horsepower.” Allen realized that Gates was right, and they agreed to wait until, in accordance with Moore’s Law, a microprocessor twice as powerful came out in a year or two. The parameters of their partnership were becoming clear. “I was the idea man, the one who’d conceive of things out of whole cloth,” explained Allen. “Bill listened and challenged me, and then homed in on my best ideas to help make them a reality. Our collaboration had a natural tension, but mostly it worked productively and well.”³⁷

Gates had gotten a contract to analyze traffic patterns for a company that counted how many cars ran over rubber tubes laid across roads. He and Allen decided to create a special-purpose computer that would process the raw data. Showing his clunky taste, Gates chose the name Traf-O-Data for their new venture. They went to a nearby Hamilton Avnet electronics store and, with a great sense of the moment, shelled out $360 in cash to buy a single 8008 chip. Allen recalled the moment vividly: “The sales clerk handed us a small cardboard box, which we opened then and there for our first look at a microprocessor. Inside an aluminum foil wrapper, stuck into a small slab of nonconductive black rubber, was a thin rectangle about an inch long. For two guys who’d spent their formative years with massive mainframes, it was a moment of wonder.” Gates told the clerk, “That’s a lot of money for such a little thing,” but he and Allen were suitably impressed, for they knew the little chip contained the brains of a whole computer. “These people thought it was the strangest thing ever to have these kids coming in and buying an 8008,” Gates recalled. “And we were so worried as we unwrapped the foil that we would break the thing.”³⁸

In order to write a program that would work on the 8008, Allen devised a way to emulate the microprocessor on a mainframe computer. As he later explained, the emulation of the 8008 “reflected a truism in technology circles that harkened back to the theories of Alan Turing in the 1930s: any computer could be programmed to behave like any other computer.” There was another lesson in this feat of alchemy, one that was at the core of what Gates and Allen contributed to the computer revolution: “Software trumped hardware,” Allen later explained.³⁹

Given their reverence for software over hardware, it is not surprising that Gates and Allen were able to write a good program for their proposed traffic tabulator but were never able to get the hardware components working properly, most notably the mechanism that was supposed to read the traffic tapes. One day, after they thought they had it running smoothly, an official with the Seattle engineering department came to Gates’s family home to be given a sales demo. As they sat in the living room, the demo gods had their revenge and the tape reader kept failing. Gates ran to get his mother. “Tell him, Mom!” he implored. “Tell him it worked last night!”⁴⁰

The final semester of Gates’s senior year, in the spring of 1973, he and Allen were recruited by the Bonneville Power Administration, which was on a nationwide hunt for PDP-10 experts to help program its electrical grid management system. Gates and his parents talked to Lakeside’s headmaster, who agreed that the job would be more educational than attending his last semester of school. Allen felt the same way about his semester at Washington State: “Here was a chance to work together again on a PDP-10, and for pay!” They piled into Gates’s Mustang convertible, drove the 165 miles south from Seattle to the Bonneville command center in under two hours, and rented a cheap apartment together.

Their work was in an underground bunker on the Columbia River across from Portland. “They had this massive control room, which looks better than any TV show I’ve ever seen,” Gates recalled. He and Allen would hunker down for coding sessions that lasted twelve hours or more. “When Bill felt himself flagging, he’d grab a jar of Tang, pour some powder on one hand, and lick it off for a pure sugar high,” Allen recalled. “His palms had a chronic orange tinge that summer.” Sometimes, after a two-day work binge, they would get “slept up,” as Gates called it, by crashing for eighteen hours or so. “We had contests,” Gates said, “to see who could stay in the building like three days straight, four days straight. Some of the more prudish people would say ‘Go home and take a bath.’ We were just hard-core, writing code.”⁴¹

Occasionally Gates would take a break for some extreme waterskiing, including dry-dock starts from diving platforms, then go back to the bunker for more coding. He and Allen got along well, except when Allen’s methodical chess-playing style would triumph over Gates’s more reckless and aggressive approach. “When I beat him one day, he got so angry that he swept the pieces to the floor,” said Allen. “After a few games like that, we stopped playing.”⁴²