811Allen and Gates were euphoric, but not for long: They
had not even begun to write a program for the Altair. The
challenge of doing so in five weeks would have been
unimaginable but for one thing: The electronic core of the
Altair was the Intel 8080 computer chip, and for years Allen
and Gates had been devising machines and software based
on the Intel 8008, whose logic was similar to the 8080.
The boys had met in 1967 at Lakeside, an elite private
school in Seattle, when Gates was in seventh grade, Allen in
ninth. That year, the Lakeside Mothers Club had bought time
on a digital training terminal that connected by phone to a
company that leased a mainframe computer. Within weeks of
its installation, this computer had become Gates’s life. He
remained in the terminal room after school and late into the
evenings, breaking only for Coke and pizza. Sometimes he
conked out while staring at the screen; his clothes were per-
petually wrinkled and spattered with pizza sauce. “He lived
and breathed computers,” a friend recalled.
Gates learned programming by writing programs and
seeing what worked. His first was for playing tic-tac-toe. He
also designed a program for student schedules at Lakeside.
He placed “all the good girls in the school” (and very few
males of any kind) in his own classes—an early manifestation
of his penchant for defeating competitors by conniving to
eliminate them.
Although his father was a wealthy corporate attorney
and his mother a prominent socialite, Gates was preoccupied
with making money. In high school he took a job tabulating
automobile traffic data; this required that he count the holes
in a roll of paper punched out when automobiles passed
over a hose. He designed a computerized machine to count
and analyze the data and he formed a company, Traf-O-Data,
to build and market the device. But, Traf-O-Data failed to
attract many customers—most municipalities and highway
departments lost interest when they learned that the com-
pany was run by high school students.
Gates, who earned a perfect score on the math portion
of the SAT, chose a complex strategy to gain admission to the
most competitive colleges. In his application to Harvard, he
emphasized his political involvement (he had worked one
summer as a congressional page); to Yale, he cited his creativ-
ity (a starring role in a dramatic production) and character (a
former Boy Scout); and to Princeton, “I positioned myself as a
computer nerd.” Admitted to all three, he went to Harvard.
Allen went to work as a programmer for Honeywell. But
when they began work on the Altair operating program,
Allen moved into Gates’s dormitory and Gates skipped most
classes. To save time, they built a simulator based on the pub-
lished specifications of the Altair and feverishly churned out
the operating software.
They completed the program just hours before Allen
boarded the plane to Albuquerque. (Allen went because he
was older and presumably a more credible “corporate”
spokesman.) The next morning, Allen fed long rolls of
punched yellow paper tape—the software—into an Altair
while company executives looked on skeptically. For fifteen
minutes the machine clattered away. Misgivings mounted.
Then the teletype printed the word, “READY.” Allen typed,
“PRINT 2 + 2.” The teletype spat out “4.” The program
worked. Gates and Allen had a deal.
Gates dropped out of Harvard and formed a partnership
with Allen. They called their company Microsoft and moved
to Albuquerque. They wrote operating programs for personal
computers introduced by Apple, Commodore, and Radio
Shack. Soon money was pouring into Microsoft. In 1979 they
moved Microsoft to Bellevue, Washington, near Seattle. Then
came the blockbuster.
In 1980 IBM, the world’s foremost manufacturer of main-
frame computers, belatedly entered the home computer
market. IBM approached Gates to write the operating soft-
ware for its new, state-of-the-art personal computer. IBM
intended to keep the computer’s specifications secret so that
other manufacturers could not copy its design, but Gates
shrewdly proposed that IBM make its specifications public.
Doing so would allow the IBM personal computer to become
the industry standard, giving IBM the edge in developing
peripherals—printers, monitors, keyboards, and various
applications. IBM agreed. Now Gates’s software, called
Microsoft-Disk Operating System (MS-DOS), would run every
IBM personal computer as well as every computer made by
other companies according to the IBM specifications. In a sin-
gle stroke, Gates had virtually monopolized the market for
PC operating software.
Microsoft’s sales jumped from $7.5 million in 1980 to
$140 million in 1985. Then Microsoft moved into software
applications: word processing, accounting, and games. After
Allen was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in 1983, he
briefly retired and purchased the Portland Trail Blazers bas-
ketball team; he became a billionaire. By 1991, Gates was the
wealthiest man in the world. In 1994, he and his wife estab-
lished the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; by 2010, it had
assets of over $33 billion and gave nearly $2 billion annually
to charitable causes, especially education.Questions for Discussion
■Intelligence, ambition, business sense, or all three? In
what ways did Bill Gates’s triumph parallel Andrew
Carnegie’s a century earlier?
■What was the main prerequisite for Gates’s triumph?