Bill Gates

by Michael Becraft

  Among her achievements, she served on the board of United Way of King County (1974–88) and many other nonprofit and corporate boards. Her work with United Way led to national recognition of her leadership. She served as a member of the board of directors of United Way International (1980–1990) and was the first woman to chair the executive committee of that board (1985–87).4

  While serving in the United Way International role, she is reported to have spoken to the chairperson of IBM in a talk that potentially provided support to Bill Gates’s software company, which was very small at the time. As Gates frequently recalls in his talks, luck would come into play multiple times in the coming decades.5

  GROWING UP BILL

  His father wrote a book, with a chapter detailing what he learned from Bill and his two sisters. Young Bill Gates was the second of the three children, with one older sister and one younger sister. Older sister Kristi was 10 and Bill was 9, when youngest sister Libby was born. His father noted Bill was usually the last one to the car or be ready for an event, as he was usually in his room reading or thinking. He described Bill as reading almost nonstop, and mentions that his son’s competitive nature was likely assisted over the summers by a contest run by his school: “One contributor to Trey’s nonstop reading was the fact that every summer the teachers at his school gave their students a summer reading list and there was a contest to see who could read the most books. Trey was so competitive he always wanted to win and often did.”6

  Not only did Bill read an entire set of encyclopedias from front to back, his parents paid for any—and every—book he wanted.7 Reading for young Bill was connected to another capability his father noted later in life: the ability to read massive quantities and still retain almost all the information from that reading. He wrote that Bill “seems to remember everything he reads and is, at times, eager to share what he’s learned with the next person he encounters,” and that his son was always intellectually curious.8 When asked of the best advice he had ever received from his father, Bill stated:

  Well, my dad and my mom were great at encouraging me as a kid to do things that I wasn’t good at, to go out for a lot of different sports like swimming, football, soccer, and I didn’t know why. At the time I thought it was kind of pointless, but it ended up really exposing me to leadership opportunities and showing me that I wasn’t good at a lot of things, instead of sticking to things that I was comfortable with.9

  AN EXCEPTIONALLY HARD TRANSITION

  The experience of the Gates family became much more challenging when Bill Gates was about 11. “The first stage—argumentative young boy—‘started about the time he was 11,’ Mr. Gates Sr. says in one of a series of interviews. That’s about when young Bill became an adult, says Bill Sr., and an increasing headache for the family.”

  In Robert Guth’s words, Gates was “a boy who appeared to gain the intellect of an adult almost overnight” and was challenging his parents on a daily basis, especially his mother.10 In another interaction, she asked:

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m thinking,” he shouted back.

  “You’re thinking?”

  “Yes, Mom, I’m thinking,” he said fiercely. “Have you ever tried thinking?”11

  Another day, young Bill was having a nasty argument with his mother at dinner. So his father threw a glass of water into his son’s face, to which he responded, “Thanks for the shower.”

  This was followed shortly thereafter by consultations with a therapist and 12-year-old Bill. And the advice to his parents was to give him more leeway, rather than less, as young Bill would be claiming his independence at some point in the near future. Even today, his father states: “He has very fixed ideas of some things…. The dynamic of the family is that you don’t cross him on those things, because it’s a waste of time.”12

  SEEDS OF CIVIC INVOLVEMENT EARLY IN LIFE

  In many works, Bill relates the experiences he encountered while growing up in the Gates family. For instance, he describes extensive volunteer involvement of both of his parents, setting the framework for his later philanthropic efforts but also being exposed to a wide variety of activities, holding discussion in a way that allowed him and his two sisters to be exposed to advanced concepts within those organizations and how decisions were made from a very young age.

  We learned from our parents what they were trying to do, whether it was United Way or a volunteering activity or the world of business. I felt very equipped as I was dealing with adults to talk to them in a comfortable fashion because my parents had shared how they thought about things.13

  When I was growing up, my parents were almost (sic) involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that. And so it’s fascinating. At the dinner table my parents are very good at sharing the things that they were doing. And almost treating us like adults, talking about that. My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.14

  This civic involvement was present in all three children, although Bill would receive the inclination latest. His older sister, Kristianne Gates Blake, was born in 1954 and owns an eponymous accounting firm, also graduating from the University of Washington like mother and father.15 She now serves as a regent for the University of Washington like her father: “The biggest lesson I learned from my dad,” she said, “is to have a passion for all that you do.”16

  Younger sister Elizabeth (Libby) Gates Armintrout was born in 1964, and served as president of the board at the Lakeside Academy—the same school attended by Bill Gates. She is a board member of the UW Carlson Leadership and Public Service Office and is an active volunteer and contributor.17

  Each sibling found their own career path but also was involved in service, like their parents. For Kristianne, that was an appointment to the Board of Regents at the University of Washington, and for Libby, that was involvement with Make-A-Wish Foundation, the Lakeside Clinic, the Alliance for Education, and the Susan B. Komen Race for the Cure18 before becoming a regent for Pomona College.19 Bill’s civic involvement comes decades later but becomes the most important aspect of his life.

  Chapter 2

  EARLY DAYS IN COMPUTING

  Very early in his learning of computers, Bill Gates suddenly found himself involved with a group that solved computing problems for his high school in the late 1960s, when very few organizations had computers and even fewer had the technical capability to actually use computers—programming expertise was essential. It was through this experience that Bill Gates met his first critical collaborative partner—Michael Eisner wrote in Working Together, Why Great Partnerships Succeed that Bill Gates always has at least one exceptionally capable partner. From 1968 through 1983, the first of these exceptional everyday partners for Bill Gates was Paul Allen.1

  At the Lakeside School, he had a lot of opportunities and encouragement from a young age, seeking a means of growth that would give him the independence the therapist stated was coming very soon. He and Paul Allen also had access to a lot of resources that were very rare at that time. For instance, Gates had access to a type of computer that had been invented just a few years before, and the teachers at the school weren’t the most capable at programming those computers. In addition to being allowed to read ahead and receiving books from teachers, Gates said of his teachers and school that their ideas on using computers were revolutionary. Rather than allow the computer to be disused (as too confusing), the school allowed the students to take the lead. As Gates said later, “most schools would have just, I don’t know, shut the thing down or something.”2

  Bill Gates’s first programming experience came in 1968 at Seattle’s Lakeside School when the Mothers’ Club bought the school access to a time-sharing system. That summer, 12-year-old Bill and his friend Paul Allen, who was two years older, made $4,200 writing an academic sch
eduling system for the school.3

  A high school student who wrote the scheduling software for the school could very easily decide which classes he would be placed in. Bill decided to modify the software he and Paul had written to be placed in classes that were entirely filled with girls, which he saw as a clear sign of success for high school students. He later stated, “It was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success. I was hooked.”4

  Although he was the youngest on the team of students, he very early established that his involvement in the project would be contingent upon him being in charge of the initiative: “Look, if you want me to come back you have to let me be in charge. But this is a dangerous thing, because if you put me in charge this time, I’m going to want to be in charge forever after.”5

  A criticism of Bill Gates over the decades was that the final responsibility for decisions in settings where he was involved in day-to-day operations rested solely with him. This characteristic has been present in descriptions of Gates from the time he was 12; at times, this attribute was a benefit and at other times a significant failing.

  Living up to his father’s statements about his son’s ability to recall information, Bill Gates is easily able to recount the teachers who had the biggest influence in his early high school days, a testament to their influence on Bill over 40 years ago. In an interview with Serwer, he recalled three of those exceptional individuals from his high school days by name: Fred Wright, Gary Maestretti, and Paul Stocklim.6

  Success as a computer programmer—in the late 1960s and today—is highly dependent upon a skillset in science, mathematics, and logic. Gates credits his teachers in science and mathematics as key influences in his success, simultaneously noting that he ignored the most important aspects of biology due to the poor quality of his high school teacher.

  Well, I think it all comes down to how good the teachers are in 5th through 12th grade…. If I hadn’t had great teachers during those years I wouldn’t have learned how cool science and math are. In fact, I had a bad biology teacher and it’s only as an adult that I’ve realized, hey, biology might be the most interesting science of all. But I stayed away from it. So the science is interesting, and yet it can be made very uninteresting.7

  Twenty years after Paul Allen’s departure from Microsoft, Gates and Allen speak at a Portland Trail Blazers game; the NBA team is owned by Allen. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

  And due to this extensive background in science and mathematics, he was able to get the experience he needed with computer software and hardware, at a time when an obsessive level of engagement in an activity of interest was important: “The hard-core years, the most fanatical years, are thirteen to sixteen.”8

  Gates read extensively while in school, learned advanced practices in computer programming before the concept of personal computers existed, and took advantage of the opportunities that were available, both in high school and in computers elsewhere. Although Gates never completed the college degree he started in 1973, he did have a strong educational background from his elite private school, his reading, and his inquisitive nature.

  ACCESS TO COMPUTERS

  In addition to the computer available at the Lakeside School, Gates did have access to other computers. Most of those computers were based upon time-sharing—having to buy time on computers was what got Bill Gates and Paul Allen into software programming; the pair quickly figured out that their ability to find problems in the software written by others could be used to trade for even more computer time. While Gates and Allen both knew how to program, Allen knew far more about the hardware of the day.9

  Gates recalled the computers he used at the University of Washington in an e-mail communication much later, and how the University of Washington had unfettered access to a type of computer located at Computer Center Corporation (CCC) that became very important to Gates and Allen in creating future software. At first, the pair started using a computer that required entering data via punch cards, but then they progressed through various buildings, using the resources available. This included calculators, remote computers via teletypes, and even a physically present PDP-10 that the group would use after Paul Allen discovered the computer was available for about six hours per day when it was not processing data. Although those hours were in the middle of the night, Gates wrote that a “friend had a key to the Physics Building so we went up there a lot of times.”10

  Gates and Allen quickly figured out a system where they could have almost unlimited access to computers for experimentation—as long as this was done in the middle of the night when the other processing was completed. The teletype system further allowed the pair to access CCC’s computers and run programs by sending messages over the telephone, common in the early days of shared computers with limited processing power. Using the array of machines at the University of Washington helped Gates and Allen learn about solving problems in various languages and operating systems, and led to their first business outside of the Lakeside School.

  TRAF-O-DATA

  Gates, Allen, and a friend—Paul Gilbert—began work on a project called Traf-O-Data when the Intel 8008 chip was released. In 1972, governments were already measuring the amount of traffic that flowed down streets by placing rubber hoses across a key point, and those hoses were connected to a box on the side of the road. Although this process continues today, the method of evaluating the data has changed substantially. The 1970s’ versions of highway traffic measurement had a box on the side of the road filled with a roll of paper tape that was punched with a hole each time a vehicle drove by; those paper tapes had to be unrolled, and traffic counts were calculated by hand.

  Allen knew more about computer hardware than Gates but still didn’t know how to build a computer that would process the data on the paper tapes. So Paul Gilbert became the third partner. The company would build a computer using the 8008 processor as well as software that would process all the traffic tapes. The plan was to sell this machine to every state and local government as a time and cost-saving tool. Allen had come across a new concept in computer science called emulation; although Gilbert had not yet built their Traf-O-Data computer, Allen wrote a program for the PDP-10s to behave as if the computer was running on an 8008 processor. Effectively, Allen was using the computer access the team had to write software for a computer that had not yet been built. This skill in emulation gave Gates and Allen another big break three years later when the announcement that would lead to the creation of Microsoft was made.11

  Once Allen had written the software, Gilbert finished building the small computer with a brand new processor. The system was able to process the paper tapes that had previously been processed manually, and the trio was ready to seek their first sale. As Gates’s father noted, “after many successful kitchen-table practice sessions my son convinced some employees of the City of Seattle to come to the house for a demonstration.” The tape reader did not work on the day of the demonstration, which frustrated Bill immensely.12 While the group continued to work on Traf-O-Data, the project was solely passed on to Gilbert before the one—and only—functional machine was sold in 1975.

  Allen later recalled how important the development of Traf-O-Data was to creating their next software initiative: “Even though Traf-O-Data wasn’t a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft’s first product a couple of years later. We taught ourselves to simulate how microprocessors work using DEC computers, so we could develop software even before our machine was built.”13

  As he was closing up his high school years, Gates served as a page in the Washington State Legislature in Olympia and later as a Congressional page in Washington, D.C.14

  Yet Gates was still a problem at times for his parents, admitting that he was exceptionally headstrong and that his father made a surprising—yet liberating—choice on behalf of his son in high school. Despite knowing that he was a difficult child for his parents, he was allowed to take time away from
high school in order to work: “I got a job offer and it would take me away from school, and I was amazed that my dad, after meeting with the headmaster and getting all the data, said, ‘Yeah, that’s something you can go and do.’”15

  In his final year of high school, Bill Gates was allowed by his parents to work full time in computer programming before starting college. The job he was offered, as a programmer at TRW, is the only time in his life that he has officially had a supervisor or boss.

  In an era where all operations on a computer had to be programmed by the user, Gates admits that his high school years were when he became addicted to programing. Leaving the Lakeside School and headed to Harvard, he personally felt that he had already become committed to being involved in software. While many individuals attend college and change majors, the admission of being a software person as a law major creates a potential conflict in purpose. The result was a student who rapidly completed the advanced mathematics and computing classes offered by Harvard between 1973 and 1975.

  Gates’s intellectual curiosity was both a positive aspect and a negative aspect; like with the example of enjoying the sciences and mathematics, he also described sitting in classes in college where he was not registered as a student and not attending the classes for which he had registered: “Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for.”16

  At Harvard, he found the intellectual challenges he was looking for, whether he went to the correct classes or not. Entrepreneurs and businesspeople often share ideas and skills, which lead to many companies in the same industries—or requiring the same skill set—choosing to locate in the same area. Silicon Valley in California is one such example today, where many computer-oriented firms maintain their headquarters. Networks are critical today and were in 1973. It was at Harvard that Gates also met Steve Ballmer, who became his best friend.