Bill Gates remembers his early programming career

programming is where you're describing to the machine how to do something and so telling it how to play tic-tac-toe telling it how to play the game board game Monopoly telling it how to convert numbers from one base to another and the idea of okay there's these simple instructions but if you put them together then you can synthesize something quite complex it's a fascinating kind of mathematical thing how can you make it fast how can you make it small and I went through several phases of doing more complex programs where people who were great programmers would look at my work give me feedback on it and you know you get to you you're you can be quite a good programmer and it was kind of a such a intense activity between the age of 13 and 17 that you know we learned a lot eventually one of the programs we took armless the idea of the scheduling of of our school when should the classes meet who should be in which section say how all these requests for people who want different classes and keeping them small and not having the teachers teach too many classes in a row very complex kind of software problem and actually when the school first asked me to do it when I was 15 I said that I didn't know how and they asked some adults to do it and that didn't work and then about a year later I'd figured out how to do it and so my friends and I actually did the software that did all this high school scheduling it had some fantastic benefits to us and we got paid for doing it it was exactly the kind of complex problem that developed my skills very well and you know we got some degree of control over who is in our classes and so you know it combined the best of everything initially when that teletype showed up there were probably 20 kids who sort of Soudan interest and it was confusing enough that it got winnowed down to about eight or nine fairly quickly who were quite serious about it and then there were about four of us who were hyper serious you know kind of doing it day and night and two of them were two years older than I was and one I was my same age now in a high school people are two years ahead of you you know they don't socialize with the young kids all that much so the idea that we had this group of four of us you know it's kind of unusual we called it the lakeside programming group and one of the companies we'd been doing work for went bankrupt the one in Seattle and so we went to one in Portland Oregon computer center Corporation C cubed which had been in the University District in Seattle and we'd spent a lot of time there and they were wonderful to us they weren't a well-run business so they went bankrupt so this company down in Portland Oregon said hey we're not just going to give you computer time you have to do something so we agreed to write this payroll program and a payroll program is surprisingly complicated there's all these taxes and reports and things at the state level and federal level anyway they said well if you could write one of those we'd at least give you free computer time and so I ago she ated that deal and the two older members Paul Alan and Rick said well you know this is there's not enough work to go around so we're gonna take charge of this and I said okay you know I'm not that interested because I had in mind how I wanted to do the payroll program and so they they messed around for about three months didn't get much done and then said we you join backup and I said okay but you know if so I'm in charge of this and you know it's gonna kind of set a precedent for future activities but they said no no that's fine and so we worked we actually finished this payroll program there was a lot of work the friend was my age Kent Evans and I ended up doing the lion's share of the work now tragically right as he and I finished that he was killed in a mountain climbing accident and so then there were there were just three of us left who'd been extremely involved including Paul Allen who is the one who was reading the magazines even more than I was and he was the one who actually saw this computer on a chip so-called microprocessor in a very small obscure article but he saw that it would be deeply important and brought that to me in 1971 so we were still 15 I was 15 and he was 17 at the time so these CQ people have this computer which is a time-sharing computer and they're letting us come in at night and they had this deal with the company made the computer digital equipment corporation that they had this acceptance period if they could find problems with it they could delay their rental payments and so they thought of us as kind of monkeys that might find some problems and help them delay their rental payments well that was a fair analysis because at first we were just completely goofing around like we'd have try to run hundreds of jobs at the same time or have all the jobs try and grab the same resources to see if we could get the system to fail and we did in kind of this brute force approach and so that would they would report that as a problem delay their rental payment well as a few months went by actually about four months by the end of it we had gotten very sophisticated in fact we've gotten the source code of the operating system out of the garbage can and we're reading it and the kind of problems we were finding were far more subtle in fact we'd not only find the problem we'd look and we'd suggest how they might fix it well anyway digital equipment got so tired of this they said look you got to pay you're gonna be able to find problems these these kinds of problems forever but we need to get paid and so then there was a question whether they would let us stay there or not and it was pretty tenuous and so Paul and I you know we understood the system well enough that we could look at all the passwords of the dairy various accounts and so you know we could use literally any account and then people when they found out we've done that they got kind of mad about that they weren't sure how mad they should be about it cuz we hadn't really caused any damage but you know wasn't a good thing you know computer hacking was literally just being invented at the time and so fortunately we got off with a bit of a warning but there actually was a period that because of that they said we weren't supposed to use the computer and it was over a summer and Paul actually went up to the University of Washington found ways to use the computer and get connected up and he he took a while before he told me and then eventually he told me about that and we got we got back on I was really quite serious about math at the time and various science things Paul it actually read more science fiction than I had bite I mean by a lot and so he and I would talk about that but I had plenty of things it was not wasn't some great tragedy but then we got you know pulled back in then that company went bankrupt and then we had the work for this Portland company on the payroll program and then we had the scheduling program and so you know we were lucky there were always kind of things that not only gave us an opportunity but exposed us to that next level you know after the payroll program then there was a computer project to use computers to control all the electricity grid and the dams of the Pacific Northwest as a government agent called Bonneville Power had done a contract with a company called tier W to use computers to do all this control and TRW had committed to do all this really high reliability great software work well they found it more difficult than they expected and so they were looking for people who understood they these kinds of computers which Paul and I Paul Alan and I had done a lot of work on this was the same computer that was a computer center corporation and at this Portland company information scientist anyway so they they we were kind of famous but nobody had met us because we'd filed these problem reports and by the end of these problem reports we they were so sophisticated it was like who are these guys you know out in Seattle telling us how to fix all this stuff and so when TRW is saying hey we're desperate find us they're telling digital equipment who makes these things find us the best programmers and somebody says well there's gates and alan and somebody says well nobody's really met them but yeah but they're really good you know we ought to be able to track them down so they find us this one guy and we go for an interview and they you know these two kids show up and I was I when I was interviewed I was 16 when they interviewed me so they're like well we can hire you but you know then they talked to us about software and we clearly know a lot and when you're young and you know a lot people don't have any kind of intermediate thing you're either you know what you're supposed to be which is Secutor doesn't know that much or they think whoa what you know this guy is the limit well we were pretty good programmers but anyway so we got jobs at this TRW and that exposed me to some programmers who are way better than I was who critiqued my work I could look at their work you know this one guy was really a phenomenal program and he would just take my stuff and rip it apart you know in this super constructive way anyway it was it was a brilliant thing and and so part of my senior year and the summer before and after the senior Paul and I were down in Vancouver Washington working on this project so it kind of took our understanding to a whole new level and it exposed us to a bunch of people there and you know Paul the whole time ever since he'd seen that microprose article is saying you know there's an opportunity here this is going to be big you know we ought to think what we're gonna do about this so we kept kept talking about that

Channel: The Financial Review

Views: 603,833

Rating: 4.8806453 out of 5

Keywords: bill gates, microsoft, bill gates interview, financial review, bill gates advice, early microsoft, bill gates young, bill gates career, microsoft career, early bill gates career, business, bill gates programming, bill gates early programming, programming career

Id: vYXQTrYPenQ

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018