Source Code: My Beginnings

4 ideas

1. Altair BASIC demo built without the hardware

   After the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover showed the MITS Altair 8800, Gates and Paul Allen told MITS founder Ed Roberts they had a BASIC for its Intel 8080 before they had written any of it. They built the interpreter on Harvard's PDP-10 using an 8080 emulator Allen wrote from the chip manual, never touching a real Altair. Allen wrote the bootstrap loader on the flight to Albuquerque, and the code ran on the machine at its first demonstration, which led to the MITS deal and the founding of Micro-Soft.

2. Early unmetered access compounds into lasting advantage

   In 1968 the Lakeside Mothers Club paid for a teletype terminal linked to a time-sharing computer, when almost no teenagers had any computer access. Gates and his friends later traded bug-finding at the Computer Center Corporation for free after-hours time, and kept finding ways back to machines. Thousands of hours of self-directed practice gave them skills that were rare exactly when the microprocessor arrived, and Gates credits that luck of timing and privilege as much as his talent.

3. Software as a licensed standalone product

   Gates and Allen treated software as a product separate from hardware, not a free add-on to sell machines. Gates's 1976 'Open Letter to Hobbyists' made the same point publicly: if people copy software freely, no one can afford to pay programmers to write good software.

4. Parental autonomy as channel for obsessive focus

   Gates's parents clashed with their intense, defiant adolescent son, and a therapist told them he would win the fight, so they should give him more independence. They let him set his own direction, and his obsessive focus went into long unsupervised computing, business ventures like Traf-O-Data, and later leaving Harvard. Gates adds that today he would probably be diagnosed as on the autism spectrum, which recasts traits once treated as behavior problems as a way of thinking to work with.

Save and mark ideas in the app