— Ch. 1 · The Lakeside Terminal —
Bill Gates.
~8 min read · Ch. 1 of 7
In 1970, a group of students at Lakeside School in Seattle gathered around a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal. Bill Gates was one of them. He had just turned thirteen years old when the Mothers' Club bought this machine for the school using proceeds from a rummage sale. The computer ran on General Electric hardware and offered limited time to students who wanted to learn programming. Gates wrote his first program on that machine. It was a version of tic-tac-toe that let users play against the computer. He became fascinated by how the system executed code perfectly every single time.
When the free computer time ran out, Gates and other students sought access elsewhere. They found a PDP-10 minicomputer owned by Computer Center Corporation. The company banned Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans after they exploited bugs to get extra hours. The four boys formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to earn money. They returned to CCC with an offer: find software bugs in exchange for more time. Gates went to their offices and studied source code for programs like Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. This arrangement lasted until 1970 when the company closed its doors.
A teacher later asked Gates and Kent Evans to automate the school's class scheduling system. They worked hard to finish before senior year. Tragically, Evans died in a mountain climbing accident during their junior year. Gates described it as one of the saddest days of his life. He then partnered with Paul Allen to complete the project. At seventeen, Gates started Traf-O-Data to build traffic counters using Intel 8008 processors. In 1972, he served as a congressional page in the House of Representatives. He graduated from Lakeside School in 1973 with a score of 1590 on the SAT.
The Albuquerque Gambit
In January 1975, Popular Electronics magazine published an issue featuring the MITS Altair 8800 computer. Bill Gates read about it and contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. He told them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In reality, neither Gates nor Paul Allen owned an Altair. They had not written any code for it yet. Their goal was simply to gauge interest from the manufacturer.
MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demonstration. Over several weeks, they developed an emulator running on a minicomputer followed by the actual BASIC interpreter. The meeting took place at MITS offices in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It succeeded and led to a deal distributing the software as Altair BASIC. MITS hired Allen while Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard University to work there in November 1975. They named their partnership Micro-Soft before dropping the hyphen later.
Microsoft registered its trade name with the Secretary of State of New Mexico on the 26th of November 1976. Gates never returned to Harvard to finish his degree. His parents supported his decision after seeing how much he wanted to start the company. He explained that if things failed, he could always go back to school. Microsoft's Altair BASIC became popular among hobbyists but leaked copies spread widely. In February 1976, Gates wrote An Open Letter to Hobbyists asserting over 90% of users had not paid for the software. He argued this threatened professional development incentives. The letter angered many computer enthusiasts yet Gates persisted in his belief that developers deserved payment.