by Paul Allen
FREED OF MY obligations to MITS, I fell into the programmer’s natural cycle and coded long into the night, when distractions are fewest and you can submerge into a problem. Then I’d crash for six or seven hours and drag in close to noon. Our office culture was much the same as at MITS, with loud rock and casual attire. We weren’t much for corporate trappings. When Texas Instruments came to confer one day, we had to send someone out to buy two guest chairs for the reception area.
“Hope you are not working too hard,” my father wrote me. “You need to take it a little easy and get away for a time, otherwise you will burn yourself out. Also hope you decided to buy the nice leather coat.” The truth was that time and money were both in short supply. I continued to make $16,000 in salary, plus a low-five-figure distribution as a partner—as in most start-ups, we plowed our profits back into the business. Three years after Ed Roberts sprang for my hotel room, I still didn’t have a credit card. In February 1978, the Albuquerque National Bank rejected my application for a MasterCharge, citing “insufficient credit file.” Offended, I appealed: “I am particularly interested to know how much of a factor my religion is in your continued rejection of my application.” (When asked to designate my denomination, I usually checked “None.”)
In general, money wasn’t an issue because there wasn’t much to spend it on. Albuquerque, as I used to say half-jokingly, was a repeating pattern of a 7-Eleven, a gas station, a movie theater, and a fast-food joint. Bill and I never missed a blockbuster opening; I remember Superman and especially the first Star Wars and its epic opening battle scene. There were occasional concerts, like Ted Nugent or the Marshall Tucker Band, where I’d watch the guitarists to see how I might copy their licks. That was about it.
After renting a house within walking distance of the office, I splurged and bought an Advent front-projection television, one of the first of its kind, with a twenty-four-square-foot screen. Bill would come by to watch any Muhammad Ali fight, shadowboxing along with the champ. Others joined me for Saturday Night Live, or I’d visit Marc, who’d invested in another avant-garde technology coinciding with the Altair: the Betamax videocassette recorder. He built a library of fastidiously labeled movies and SNL episodes; we never tired of the “Czech Brothers” skits with Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd, who later became a close friend.
Marc was an outstanding programmer who talked a thousand miles a minute and got cantankerous at times. He liked to be different. He kept a pet iguana and swore by Saabs and their floor-mounted ignition switches. He stuck by Betamax until the bitter end and was almost apoplectic when it got supplanted by VHS, an inferior technology.
We had close to a dozen people on staff, and most of us were single and in our early twenties. Programmers tend to be loners, but Steve and Marla Wood would gather everyone to hang out from time to time. Marla volunteered as a docent at the local zoo and became the foster parent of a bull snake and a baby reticulated python. The python was only about five feet long, but it could startle people the first time they noticed it wrapped around her neck. Once she sat down next to Ric, who was oblivious for a minute. Then the snake moved and Ric levitated off the couch.
We had our share of characters. Bob Wallace was a wry jokester who later helped originate shareware and funded research on psychedelic drugs. Jim Lane owned a broadsword and rarely missed a medieval fair. But no one was more idiosyncratic than Gordon Let win, a brilliant nerd’s nerd who would lock himself in his office and generate reams of flawless code. Gordon trusted nobody. He would use a different name on every magazine subscription—A. Gordon Letwin, B. Gordon Letwin, and so on—just to track down the source of any junk mail. He married a woman named Rose, and they adopted a baby pig that they treated like a member of the family. The pig grew to be seventy pounds or more, and would blast through its pig door into their home like a fullback going off tackle. Years later I heard that Gordon was taking it around with him on his Learjet.
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TO RECRUIT TALENT, we published a help-wanted ad with my contact number in hobbyist magazines: “Microsoft is hiring systems programmers to work on APL, BASIC, COBOL, and FORTRAN. … Microsoft is the leader in microcomputer systems programming.” In June 1978, Intel introduced the 8086, one of the first 16-bit microprocessors and the next evolutionary step in personal computer technology. I was in regular contact with Intel and had the 8086 data sheet and instruction set well ahead of the official release. By then it was old hat for me to create development tools for chips from their specs, sight unseen.
The 8080 handled up to 65,536 bytes in memory; the new chip could address up to a megabyte. One million bytes—at the time, it seemed unlimited. I saw the potential for powerful word processing, with plenty of headroom for improved video and graphics and a full-featured operating system running underneath. To me, it was inevitable that future microcomputers would become so useful and usable that they’d be de rigueur in the corporate world.
Though there was no 16-bit hardware on the horizon, I was determined not to wait as we had for the Altair. I set to work to simulate the 8086 on the PDP-10 and rewrote my macros for the larger instruction set. When the next-generation boxes materialized, we’d be ready.
Our 8-bit business was booming, and we ran late on our deadlines as new work kept pouring in. With Bill always worried about meeting expenses, we’d make commitments with little regard for our capacity to fulfill them. People had no choice but to work longer and harder—even Miriam Lubow, Bill’s secretary, who sneaked in on weekends to do her filing without telling her husband. We maxed out what we could do on the school district’s PDP-10 and switched to a faster one in Denver. My own job became a little easier when CP/M, the operating system developed by Gary Kildall at Digital Research, began to gain traction as a de facto standard. Once I adapted BASIC to it, we no longer had to customize our software for each new computer.
Bill consciously aspired to be “hardcore,” a favorite adjective dating back to this Harvard days. He’d gulp his Cokes and work in his office deep into the night, and come in the next day cranky and bloodshot. When he really wore down, he’d take a catnap. Just after Miriam started, she was alarmed one Monday morning to find her boss sprawled on the carpet. She ran to see Steve Wood, who’d taken over from Ric as office manager, and cried, “Help me! Bill’s on the floor, and it looks like he’s unconscious!”
Steve puffed calmly on his pipe and said, “Ah, he was probably here all weekend, don’t worry about him. Just go back to work.”
“But what do I do if somebody calls for Mr. Gates? What do I tell them?”
“Tell them he’s out,” Steve said, “and you won’t be lying.”
Microsoft was a high-stress environment because Bill drove others as hard as he drove himself. He was growing into the taskmaster who would prowl the parking lot on weekends to see who’d made it in. People were already busting their tails, and it got under their skin when Bill hectored them into doing more. Bob Greenberg once put in eighty-one hours in four days, Monday through Thursday, to finish part of the Texas Instruments BASIC. When Bill touched base toward the end of Bob’s marathon, he asked him, “What are you working on tomorrow?”
Bob said, “I was planning to take the day off.”
And Bill said, “Why would you want to do that?” He genuinely couldn’t understand it; he never seemed to need to recharge.
Our company was still small in 1978, and Bill and I worked hand in glove as the decision-making team. My style was to absorb all the data I could to make the best-informed decision possible, sometimes to the point of overanalysis. Bill liked to hash things out in intense, one-on-one discussions; he thrived on conflict and wasn’t shy about instigating it. A few of us cringed at the way he’d demean people and force them to defend their positions. If what he heard displeased him, he’d shake his head and say sarcastically, “Oh, I suppose that means we’ll lose the contract, and then what?” When someone ran late on a job, he had a stock response: “I could code that in a weekend!”
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And if you hadn’t thought through your position or Bill was just in a lousy mood, he’d resort to his classic put-down: “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard!”
Good programmers take positions and stick to them, and it was common to see them square off in some heated disagreement over coding architecture. But it was tough not to back off against Bill, with his intellect and foot-tapping and body-rocking; he came on like a force of nature. The irony was that Bill liked it when someone pushed back and drilled down with him to get to the best solution. He wouldn’t pull rank to end an argument. He wanted you to overcome his skepticism, and he respected those who did. Even relatively passive people like Bob Wallace learned to stand their ground and match their boss decibel for decibel. They’d get right into his face: “What are you saying, Bill? I’ve got to write a compiler for a language we’ve never done before, and it needs a whole new set of runtime routines, and you think I can do it over the weekend? Are you kidding me?”
I saw this happen again and again. If you made a strong case and were fierce about it, and you had the data behind you, Bill would react like a bluffer with a pair of threes. He’d look down and mutter, “OK, I see what you mean,” then try to make up. Bill never wanted to lose talented people. “If this guy leaves,” he’d say to me, “we’ll lose all our momentum.”
Some disagreements came down to Bill and me, one-on-one, late at night. According to one theory, we’d installed real doors in all the offices to keep our arguments private. If that was the case, it didn’t work; you could hear our voices up and down the eighth floor. As longtime partners, our dynamic was unique. Bill couldn’t intimidate me intellectually. He knew I was on top of technical issues—often better informed than he, because research was my bailiwick. And unlike the programmers, I could challenge Bill on broader strategic points. I’d hear him out for ten minutes, look him straight in the eye, and say, “Bill, that doesn’t make sense. You haven’t considered x and y and z.”
Bill craved closure, and he would hammer away until he got there. On principle, I refused to yield if I didn’t agree. And so we’d go at it for hours at a stretch, until I became nearly as loud and wound up as Bill. I hated that feeling. While I wouldn’t give in unless convinced on the merits, I sometimes had to stop from sheer fatigue. I remember one heated debate lasting forever, until I said, “Bill, this isn’t going anywhere. I’m going home.”
And Bill said, “You can’t stop now, we haven’t agreed on anything yet!”
“No, Bill, you don’t understand. I’m so upset that I can’t speak anymore. I need to calm down. I’m leaving.”
Bill trailed me out of his office, into the corridor, out to the elevator bank. He was still getting in the last word—“But we haven’t resolved anything!”—as the elevator door closed between us.
I was Mr. Slow Burn, like Walter Matthau to Bill’s Jack Lemmon. When I got mad, I stayed mad for weeks. I don’t know if Bill noticed the strain on me, but others did. Some said Bill’s management style was a key ingredient in Microsoft’s early success, but that made no sense to me. Why wouldn’t it be more effective to have civil and rational discourse? Why did we need knock-down, drag-out fights?
Why not just solve the problem logically and move on?
WITH THE COMPANY en route to its first million-dollar year and having outgrown the bank building, Bill and I faced a decision: stay or go? After three years in New Mexico, I was ready to move. It was hard to recruit top-flight programmers to Albuquerque, not exactly a hotbed of research or technology. After the sale of MITS to Pertec, there was no real business reason to stay.
On a personal level, there were many things to love about Albuquerque: the sunsets, the climate, the clean desert air. But if you grew up around water and trees, a high desert city can never feel completely like home. I missed the green of the Pacific Northwest, and I missed my family, too.
Bill came to my house to discuss our options. He was dead set against moving to the Bay Area. He’d seen how people in Silicon Valley changed jobs every year or two, which couldn’t be good for our long-term projects. That left Seattle, because Bill missed his family, too. We could fly out to our Bay Area customers in ninety minutes, and the rainy days were a plus; they’d keep programmers from getting distracted. We agreed to finish out our lease and move home at the end of the year.
Which is the story of how Seattle inherited what is now its second-largest employer.
On Pearl Harbor Day, 1978, the Microsoft staff convened on the second floor of a shopping center for a group portrait. Despite a rare and raging snowstorm in Albuquerque that day, eleven of thirteen made it to Royal Frontier Studios. Ric Weiland was house-hunting in Seattle, and Miriam Lubow’s husband told her she’d be crazy to drive the three miles into town. (Miriam was the only employee who wouldn’t make the move with us, though she’d follow later on.)
When I look at that iconic photograph today, I see a group of young people excited about their future. Back in Boston, Bill and I had been searching for the next big thing, little knowing that we’d find it in this remote city in the Southwest. Now we had a real team behind us, and a firm sense of direction. In four years, we had come a long way.
If you look closely at that photo, you’ll see just about everyone smiling. That captures our spirit back then. When I talk about the early days at Microsoft, it’s hard to explain to people how much fun it was. Even with the absurd hours and arguments, we were having the time of our lives.
I had to leave two weeks before the others to set up the mainframe we’d bought for our software development. I scanned the map and saw that the shortest route went through Utah and Idaho, and then into Washington. I didn’t bother to check the forecast, and it was snowing like the dickens by the time I reached the Four Corners area in Utah. I was sliding all over the place in my rear-wheel-drive Monza. At one point I was listening to Earth, Wind & Fire when I spun clear off the road, which scared the heck out of me.
I tend to be obstinate in adversity. I put chains on my tires. By the time I reached a mountainous stretch between Utah and Idaho called Dead Man’s Pass, the highway was one solid sheet of ice. I passed lines of semis that had either skidded off the pavement or swerved onto an escape ramp. Most sensible people would have turned back. But I white-knuckled it down that mountain, half-sure that I was going to shoot through the guardrail.
When I finally reached Seattle (and it took close to a week), I sent word back that people should take the California route instead. They all had smooth sailing, except for Bill. He reportedly collected three speeding tickets, two of them from the same cop.
CHAPTER 9
SOFTCARD
I bought my first house in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, a four-bedroom, split-level contemporary that backed onto the woods and came complete with field mice. It had big picture windows and a spacious deck overlooking Lake Sammamish. I bolted my couch together and set up the big-screen, then unpacked my Laser-Discs and audiocassettes. My sister moved in with me for a while, and it felt as though I was home again. I’d traded in my Chevy Monza for a little black Mazda RX-7, which was fast and nimble and got me to home-cooked meals at my parents’ house in half an hour. Life was good.
With our new downtown Bellevue office to myself for a few days, I fired up our spanking new 2020, DEC’s smallest mainframe. For Microsoft, that purchase was both a rite of passage and a key to boosting our productivity: no more sharing time with junior high schools, no disruptions when some other operation monopolized or crashed the machine. Our new location resembled our old one in Albuquerque, on the eighth floor of a ten-story building owned by Old National Bank. We’d expanded from ten offices to maybe fifteen, with a good-size foyer for a receptionist. But we still had to walk single file in the corridors, sidling by boxes stacked with incoming hardware. My office was next to Bill’s, and we shared a secretary.
In April 1979, our BASIC interpreter became the first microprocessor software product to surpass a million do
llars in sales. With more than three hundred thousand users in the United States and abroad, it was installed on more machines than any other single program. But we didn’t pause to celebrate. A jumble of 8-bit computers, many of them prototypes, crowded a group of tables near the programmers’ offices. I’d need to get BASIC ported onto each of them to consolidate Microsoft’s dominance in high-level languages.
If a hardware company used a BASIC that wasn’t ours, we’d disassemble it to see if they’d reverse-engineered our copyrighted code. If our suspicions were confirmed, a stern letter or two usually sufficed. If the code came from another company, we’d press the point that our BASIC was light years better. And it was, because we’d never stopped striving to add features and improve it.
Convinced that our future lay in the 16-bit world, I began work on a stand-alone 8086 BASIC with Bob O’Rear, an air force veteran who became my de facto deputy for development. We were still working on faith, since the first 16-bit microcomputer had yet to appear. That May I took a call from Tim Patterson, a young designer at a local hardware shop called Seattle Computer Products (SCP). He’d built a prototype computer with the 8086 chip mounted on a processor board and was hunting for software to test it. I told him, “Bring it on up. We’ve got something that might work.” Tim was an engineer after my own heart, someone who’d roll up his sleeves and dive into the knottiest problems. After a week of tinkering, both hardware and software passed a run-through. It was a useful collaboration that would lead to a more important alliance down the road.
That early 8086 initiative was just one example of our trying to stay ahead of an ever-accelerating game. We constantly feared that someone might be gaining on us. In those early years in Seattle, I had a disturbing, recurrent dream: Bill and I on the flight deck of a B-17, struggling to get hold of the plane while turbulence buffeted us all over the sky. We never crashed, but we never gained complete control, either. And there was no bailing out. We were strapped in for the duration.