Bill Gates reflects on his school life

through eighth grade I was sort of enjoying the fact that I could do reasonably well without any effort they had this thing where you'd you'd get an effort which would be one two or three and then a grade and so the ideal I always wanted was an a3 where you had the least effort but the highest grade so my grades weren't all that great and then in eighth grade I had been at a private school for a couple of years and decided that I better start getting good grades both in terms of having some freedom the way I'd be treated in thinking about college so from ninth grade on I had a reasonably spotless grade record so that I got quite serious about grades at that point a math was the thing that came most natural to me and you know you take these exams some of which were sort of nationwide exams and I did quite well on those and that gave me some confidence and I had some teachers who were very encouraging they let me read textbooks they encouraged me to take college course on symbolic math which is actually called algebra so I felt pretty confident in my math skills which is a nice thing because not only the sciences but economics a lot of things if you're comfortable with math and statistics and ways of looking at cause and effect that's extremely helpful I had a one named Paul Stockland who at the school I've sat who challenged me later one named Fred Wright who challenged me then you know I actually majored in math for the time I was at at college because you know a very interesting topic but it was kind of a strange topic because there's not a direct career for most people in terms of being a full-time mathematician so for all but very few people it's a tool that you use but not probably not what you're gonna spend your life working on my parents had this notion that I had this high potential somehow and that I was not taking advantage of it that you know the environment I'd been in sort of being a goof-off was more socially rewarding than being that serious and it was public school you know so they weren't pushing people all that hard you could read the textbook in the first week and you know sort of there wasn't anything interesting gonna happen the rest of the school year and so they had me take an exam to go to a private school and I thought well should I pass this exam or not you know you could fail it and they went you wouldn't have to go but that that sort of violated my sense of integrity that you know hey I'm good at taking tests I don't want to get confused about that so I I was admitted and they encouraged me to go it was a boy school regionally strict during the time I was there it actually transitioned merged with a girls school and stopped having uniform stopped calling the teachers master so it it became pretty normal but it was a it was a change at first and the idea of just being kind of a goof off wasn't the sort of high reward position like had been in in public school so that if you know my parents were right it it had the intended effect of creating a more challenging environment and some teachers who were nice about saying that you know I should try harder and exposing me to a lot of math and science and eventually that's where I got to use the computer Lakeside was a longer school day and it you know it's a change I had gotten super comfortable at public school kind of being goofy and you know here people were studying and at first because I didn't get great grades they had me in a study hall and a few people who got really good grades and have to go to the study hall and nobody knew you know that I was actually clever so you know they were actually treating me like some half-read student anyway it was it was an adjustment and all the other kids there were making the adjustment as well so it took a couple years to get my grounding you know I'm super glad that I I went to that school it was a fantastic school I'll probably send my my kids to that school the Lakeside's mothers club had a rummage sale every year to raise money for the school and instead of just funding the budget they always would fund something kind of new and interesting in addition and without too much understanding they decided having a computer terminal at the school would be a novel thing it was a teletype uppercase only you know ten characters a second and you had to share a phone line to call in to a big computer a time-sharing computer that was very expensive it charged when you were connected up it would charge and then when you actually had a program running it would charge a lot more and so they set up this teletype and some of the math and science teachers you know played around with it one of them accidentally spent a lot of money with the infinite loop program they spent like $200 by surprise and so they were a bit intimidated and a bunch of us kind of hung out there and tried out different things the programming language was basic which was quite novel at the time it had been invented by some Dartmouth professors and so that was the first computer language I learned and I wrote I wrote increasingly complex programs and so that eighth-grade exposure was was a pretty neat thing even though what the machine we were working on was was quite limited the idea of students playing around with a computer was very unusual at the time and in fact that computer eventually the costs were high enough they they took it away but then some other computer companies had come around including one in Seattle that a bunch of us went down and volunteered to help out and do some work force so we from that point on we always managed although it was dicey at times to find access to computers and that was very unusual in high school but it took a lot of initiative on our part to get those experiences but we wouldn't have done it if we hadn't had that that early eighth-grade exposure the key point is that computers were immensely expensive and cost millions of dollars a machine that was far less powerful than than what you have in a cell phone today and so that either you'd have a very important application or you just shared the Machine with other people and still you had to pay quite a bit of money and so time surance where you're connected up and and sharing the Machine it's a lot better than sending your programs in because you can see when you make a mistake pretty quickly even so because they charge us so much we need to actually type the program's offline on a paper teeth so that we didn't have any delay for typing and then when we got onto the computer we'd feed in that tape so that there was less less time on line but it gave you a sense of okay what you got right and wrong and you could try and correct things we also because at that time the dominant form of computing was using punch cards we actually did that quite a bit we were down at the University of Washington and use some of those punch card systems as computers became less expensive so-called mini computers than more people had access mostly scientists and business people but also we managed to find machines that weren't being used at night the idea of a machine is something that an individual would use and that it would just sit there idle when they weren't using it that only made sense about a decade later when the work that we and others had done had gotten the the price down so dramatically that the idea of a computer sitting idle you know doesn't feel like some huge waste of resources like it did when they were so expensive and rare

Channel: The Financial Review

Views: 476,947

Keywords: bill gates, bill gates childhood, bill gates life, bill gates school, bill gates school days, bill gates school life, bill gates interview, bill gates advice, microsoft, microsoft gates, business, financial

Id: 6mFM3Q8cWm0

Length: 9min 49sec (589 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 29 2018