Coding the Self before Microsoft

Before there was Microsoft, before the IBM contract, before the fortune, there was a restless eleven-year-old in Seattle who had read the family encyclopedia from cover to cover and was beginning to frighten his parents. William Henry Gates III was not, by conventional measures, an easy child. His parents — Bill Sr., a prominent attorney, and Mary, a civic-minded board member of several organizations — observed in him a withdrawal and detachment that concerned them deeply; a brightness that had curdled into boredom, a social isolation they feared would harden into something permanent. Their response was to enroll him, at thirteen, in Lakeside School — Seattle's most rigorous private preparatory institution — a decision that Gates himself would later describe as "one of the best things that ever happened to me." At Lakeside, the Mother's Club rummage sale funded a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal connected to a General Electric time-sharing computer — a piece of technology so far beyond what any American secondary school possessed in 1968 that it represented, for the students who encountered it, an almost surreal window into a future that had not yet arrived. Gates was transfixed. He and Paul Allen, two years his senior and equally consumed, began spending every available hour in the school computer room — writing programs, searching for bugs in exchange for free computer time, and developing a shared conviction that gradually crystallized into something close to prophecy: that computer chips would become so powerful that every desk and every home would eventually contain one. At fifteen, the two formed their first commercial venture, Traf-O-Data, computerizing traffic pattern analysis for Seattle's municipal government and earning $20,000. Gates was not discovering a hobby. He was discovering himself.