The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 89

Up until then, Roberts had been watching quietly. He had taken his failing company further into debt on the wild surmise that he could create a computer that a home hobbyist could use and afford. Now he was watching as history was being made. For the first time, a software program had run on a home computer. “Oh my God,” he shouted. “It printed ‘4’!”⁶²

Roberts invited Allen into his office and agreed to license the BASIC interpreter for inclusion on all Altair machines. “I couldn’t stop grinning,” Allen confessed. When he arrived back in Cambridge, bringing with him a working Altair to install in Gates’s dorm room, they went out to celebrate. Gates had his usual: a Shirley Temple, ginger ale with maraschino cherry juice.⁶³

A month later, Roberts offered Allen a job at MITS as director of software. His colleagues at Honeywell thought he was crazy to consider it. “Your job’s safe at Honeywell,” they told him. “You can work here for years.” But career safety was not an ideal embraced by those eager to lead the computer revolution. So in the spring of 1975, Allen moved to Albuquerque, a city he had only recently learned was not in Arizona.

Gates decided to stay at Harvard, at least for the time being. There he endured what has become a rite of passage, amusing only in retrospect, for many of its most successful students: being hauled before the university’s secretive Administrative Board for a disciplinary process, known as being “Ad Boarded.” Gates’s case arose when auditors from the Defense Department decided to check the use of the PDP-10 that it was funding in Harvard’s Aiken Lab. They discovered that one sophomore, W. H. Gates, was using most of the time. After much fretting, Gates prepared a paper defending himself and describing how he had created a version of BASIC using the PDP-10 as an emulator. He ended up being exonerated for his use of the machine, but he was “admonished” for allowing a nonstudent, Paul Allen, to log on with his password. He accepted that minor reprimand and agreed to put his early version of the BASIC interpreter (but not the refined one he and Allen were then working on) into the public domain.⁶⁴

By that time Gates was focusing more on his software partnership with Allen than his course work at Harvard. He finished his sophomore year that spring of 1975, then flew down to Albuquerque for the summer and decided to stay there rather than return for the first semester of his junior year that fall. He went back to Harvard for two more semesters, in the spring and fall of 1976, but then left Harvard for good, two semesters shy of graduating. In June 2007, when he returned to Harvard to get an honorary degree, he began his speech by directing a comment to his father in the audience. “I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”⁶⁵

MICRO-SOFT

When Gates arrived in Albuquerque in the summer of 1975, he and Allen were still supplying BASIC for the Altair on a handshake deal with Ed Roberts. Gates insisted on a formal agreement and, after much haggling, agreed to license the software to MITS for ten years, to be bundled with each Altair, for $30 in royalty per copy. Gates was able to win two provisions that would be historically significant. He insisted that he and Allen would retain ownership of the software; MITS would merely have rights to license it. He also required that MITS use its “best efforts” to sublicense the software to other computer makers, splitting the revenues with Gates and Allen. It set a precedent for the deal Gates would make six years later with IBM. “We were able to make sure our software worked on many types of machines,” he said. “That allowed us and not the hardware makers to define the market.”⁶⁶

Now they needed a name. They kicked around a few ideas, including Allen & Gates, which they decided sounded too much like a law firm. Eventually they picked one that was not particularly exciting or inspiring but did convey that they were writing software for microcomputers. In the final documents for the MITS deal, they referred to themselves as “Paul Allen and Bill Gates doing business as MicroSoft.” A credit line appeared in the source code of what was then their only product: “Micro-Soft BASIC: Paul Allen wrote the non-runtime stuff. Bill Gates wrote the runtime stuff. Monte Davidoff wrote the math package.” Within a couple of years, the name was simplified to Microsoft.

After bunking for a while at the Sundowner Motel on a strip of Route 66 known more for prostitutes than programmers, Gates and Allen moved to a cheap furnished apartment. Monte Davidoff, of floating-point math fame, and Chris Larson, a younger student from Lakeside High, moved in, turning the apartment into a frat house doing business as a geek bunker. In the evenings Allen would crank up his Stratocaster guitar and play along with Aerosmith or Jimi Hendrix, and Gates would retaliate by loudly singing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”⁶⁷

Of them all, Gates was the prime example of the innovator’s personality. “An innovator is probably a fanatic, somebody who loves what they do, works day and night, may ignore normal things to some degree and therefore be viewed as a bit imbalanced,” he said. “Certainly in my teens and 20s, I fit that model.”⁶⁸ He would work, as he had at Harvard, in bursts that could last up to thirty-six hours, and then curl up on the floor of his office and fall asleep. Said Allen, “He lived in binary states: either bursting with nervous energy on his dozen Cokes a day, or dead to the world.”

Gates was also a rebel with little respect for authority, another trait of innovators. To folks like Roberts, a former Air Force officer with five sons who called him “Sir,” Gates came across as a brat. “He literally was a spoiled kid, that’s what the problem was,” said Roberts later. But it was more complex than that. Gates worked hard and lived frugally off his then-meager earnings, but he did not believe in being deferential. The scrawny Gates would go toe to toe with the brawny six-foot-four Roberts and engage in arguments so heated that, as Allen remembered, “you could hear them yelling throughout the plant, and it was a spectacle.”

Allen assumed that his partnership with Gates would be fifty-fifty. They had always been a team, and it seemed unnecessary to fight over who had done more. But since their spat over the payroll program in high school, Gates had insisted on being in charge. “It’s not right for you to get half,” he told Allen. “You had your salary at MITS while I did almost everything on BASIC without one back in Boston. I should get more. I think it should be sixty-forty.” Whether or not Gates was right, it was in his nature to insist on such things, and it was in Allen’s nature not to. Allen was taken aback but agreed. Worse yet, Gates insisted on revising the split two years later. “I’ve done most of the work on BASIC, and I gave up a lot to leave Harvard,” he told Allen on a walk. “I deserve more than 60 percent.” His new demand was that the split be 64-36. Allen was furious. “It exposed the differences between the son of a librarian and the son of a lawyer,” he said. “I’d been taught that a deal was a deal and your word was your bond. Bill was more flexible.” But again Allen went along.⁶⁹

In fairness to Gates, he was the person who, by then, was actually running the fledgling company. Not only was he writing much of the code, but he also was in charge of sales, making most of the calls himself. He would kick around ideas about product strategy with Allen for hours, but he was the one who made the final decisions on which versions of Fortran or BASIC or COBOL would be built. He was also in charge of business deals with the hardware makers, and he was an even tougher negotiator with them than he had been with Allen. Plus he was in charge of personnel, which meant hiring, firing, and telling people in words of one syllable when their work sucked, which is something Allen would never do. He had the credibility to do so; when there were contests in the office to see who could write a program using the fewest lines of code, Gates usually won.