The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 87

Gates applied only to three colleges his senior year—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—and he took different approaches to each. “I was born to apply for college,” he boasted, fully aware of his ability to ace meritocratic processes. For Yale he cast himself as an aspiring political type and emphasized a monthlong summer internship he had done in Congress. For Princeton, he focused only on his desire to be a computer engineer. And for Harvard, he said his passion was math. He had also considered MIT, but at the last moment blew off the interview to play pinball. He was accepted to all three and chose Harvard.⁴³

“You know, Bill,” Allen warned him, “when you get to Harvard, there are going to be some people a lot better in math than you are.”

“No way,” Gates replied. “There’s no way!”

“Wait and see,” said Allen.⁴⁴

GATES AT HARVARD

When Gates was asked to pick the types of roommates he preferred, he asked for an African American and an international student. He was assigned to Wigglesworth Hall, a freshman dorm in Harvard Yard, with Sam Znaimer, a science lover from a family of poor Jewish refugees in Montreal, and Jim Jenkins, a black student from Chattanooga. Znaimer, who had never known a privileged WASP before, found Gates very friendly and his study habits weirdly fascinating. “His habit was to do 36 hours or more at a stretch, collapse for ten hours, then go out, get a pizza, and go back at it,” he said. “And if that meant he was starting again at three in the morning, so be it.”⁴⁵ He marveled as Gates spent several nights filling out federal and state tax forms for Traf-O-Data’s revenues. When working hard, Gates would rock back and forth. Then he would grab Znaimer for a frenzy of playing Pong, the Atari video game, in the dorm lounge, or Spacewar in Harvard’s computer lab.

The computer lab was named after Howard Aiken, who had invented the Mark I and operated it during World War II with the help of Grace Hopper. It housed Gates’s favorite machine: a PDP-10 from DEC, which had been destined for military use in Vietnam but was reassigned to assist military-funded research at Harvard. To avoid sparking an antiwar protest, it was smuggled into the Aiken Lab early one Sunday morning in 1969. It was funded by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (then known as DARPA), but that was kept quiet, so there was no written policy about who could use it. There was also a slew of PDP-1 computers on which to play Spacewar. For his freshman computer project, Gates linked the PDP-10 and a PDP-1 to create a video baseball game. “The logic was on the PDP-10, but I sent it down to the PDP-1 because I used the same display as Spacewar, a line-drawing display which you don’t see anymore,” he explained.⁴⁶

Gates would stay up late writing the algorithms to direct the bounce of the ball and the angle of approach of the fielders. “The projects he worked on for the first year were not commercial,” Znaimer said. “They were mostly done for the love of computing.”⁴⁷ The professor who oversaw the lab, Thomas Cheatham, had mixed feelings: “He was a hell of a good programmer.” He was, however, also a “pain in the ass” and “an obnoxious human being. . . . He’d put people down when it was not necessary, and just generally was not a pleasant fellow to have around.”⁴⁸

Allen’s warning to Gates that he would not be the smartest kid in the class turned out to be true. There was a freshman who lived upstairs from him who was better at math, Andy Braiterman from Baltimore. They would wrestle with problem sets all night in Braiterman’s room, eating pizza. “Bill was intense,” Braiterman remembered, and also “a good arguer.”⁴⁹ Gates was particularly forceful in arguing that soon everyone would have a home computer that could be used for calling up books and other information. The following year he and Braiterman roomed together.

Gates decided to major in applied math rather than pure math, and he was able to make a small mark on the field. In a class taught by the computer scientist Harry Lewis, he was introduced to a classical problem:

The chef in our place is sloppy, and when he prepares a stack of pancakes they come out all different sizes. Therefore, when I deliver them to a customer, on the way to the table I rearrange them (so that the smallest winds up on top, and so on, down to the largest at the bottom) by grabbing several from the top and flipping them over, repeating this (varying the number I flip) as many times as necessary. If there are n pancakes, what is the maximum number of flips (as a function f(n) of n) that I will ever have to use to rearrange them?

The answer required coming up with a good algorithm, just as any computer program did. “I posed it in class and then I went on,” Lewis recalled. “A day or two later, this smart sophomore comes into my office and explains that he’s got a five-thirds N algorithm.” In other words, Gates had figured out a way to do it with five-thirds flips per pancake in the stack. “It involved a complicated case analysis of what exactly the configuration of the top few pancakes might look like. It was quite clever.” A teaching assistant in the class, Christos Papadimitriou, later published the solution in a scholarly paper coauthored with Gates.⁵⁰

As Gates was preparing to begin his sophomore year in the summer of 1974, he convinced Allen to move to the Boston area and take a job with Honeywell that had originally been offered to Gates. Allen dropped out of Washington State, drove his Chrysler east, and urged Gates to drop out as well. We’re going to miss the computer revolution, he argued. Over pizza they would fantasize about creating their own company. “If everything went right, how big do you think our company could be?” Allen asked at one point. Gates replied, “I think we could get it up to thirty-five programmers.”⁵¹ But Gates bowed to pressure from his parents to remain at Harvard, at least for the time being.

Like many innovators, Gates was rebellious just for the hell of it. He decided that he would not go to the lectures for any course in which he was enrolled, and he would audit lectures only of courses that he was not taking. He followed this rule carefully. “By my sophomore year, I was auditing classes that met at the same time as my actual classes just to make sure I’d never make a mistake,” he recalled. “So I was this complete rejectionist.”⁵²

He also took up poker with a vengeance. His game of choice was Seven Card Stud, high low. A thousand dollars or more could be won or lost per night. Gates, whose IQ surpassed his EQ, was better at calculating the odds than in reading the thoughts of his fellow players. “Bill had a monomaniacal quality,” Braiterman said. “He would focus on something and really stick with it.” At one point he gave his checkbook to Allen in order to prevent himself from squandering more money, but he soon demanded it back. “He was getting some costly lessons in bluffing,” said Allen. “He’d win three hundred dollars one night and lose six hundred the next. As Bill dropped thousands that fall, he kept telling me, ‘I’m getting better.’?”⁵³

In a graduate-level economics class, he met a student who lived down the hall of his dorm. Steve Ballmer was very different from Gates on the surface. Big, boisterous, and gregarious, he was the type of campus activity junkie who liked to join or lead multiple organizations. He was in the Hasty Pudding Club, which wrote and produced musical theater shows, and served with a cheerleader’s enthusiasm as manager of the football team. He was both the publisher of the Advocate, the campus literary magazine, and the advertising manager of the Crimson, the newspaper. He even joined one of the fraying men’s clubs, and convinced his new best friend Gates to do so as well. “A bizarre experience,” Gates called it. What bound them together was their shared superintensity. They would talk and argue and study together at high volume, each of them rocking back and forth. Then they would go to movies together. “We went and saw Singin’ in the Rain and A Clockwork Orange, which are only connected by the use of a common song,” said Gates. “And then we got to be super-good friends.”⁵⁴