Early Hacker – William Gates III Born

October 28, 1955:  Happy Birthday Bill

On October 28,1955, William Gates III was born in Seattle, WA. Bill Gates, of course, went on to start Microsoft and was CEO of Microsoft until he retired in 2008. In 2000, he started the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal

At 13 Gates attended Lakeside School. The Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School’s rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school’s students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer.

Early Gates & Allen

After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP

PDP-10

minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned the four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.

At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC’s software in exchange for computer time. Gates went to CCC’s offices and studied source code for various Earprograms that ran on the system, including Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went out of business.

“Hey now!”

The following year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in Cobol, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school’s computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with “a disproportionate number of interesting girls.”

At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the US House of Representatives.

Graduation from Lakeside

Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973. Gates did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard and spent a lot of time using the school’s computers.

After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company. Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.

In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS’s interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter.

The demonstration, held at MITS’s offices in Albuquerque was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November 1975. They named their partnership “Micro-Soft” and had their first office located in Albuquerque. Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name “Microsoft” was registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico.

BTW: Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies.

So It Begins – April 4, 1975: Microsoft Established

April 4, 1975: Microsoft Established

Bill Gates and Paul Allen were childhood friends with a passion for computer programming. While the rest of us were out riding our bikes and playing inside empty refrigerator boxes, these guys were programing rudimentary computers.

They were seeking to make a successful business utilizing their shared skills when they founded their first company, Traf-O-Data. Traf-O-Data offered a basic computer that tracked and analyzed automobile traffic data. Allen went on to pursue a degree in computer science at the University of Washington, later dropping out of school to work at Honeywell. Gates began studies at Harvard.

MITS Altair 8800

It really got serious in January of 1975 when Popular Electronics magazine published an article featuring a Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), Altair 8800 microcomputer. The MITS Altair was the first “personal computer” offered as a “build it yourself kit” for hobbyists.

Problem was, the Altair needed software, a programming language, that could make it perform useful tasks. This was Gates and Allen’s opportunity.

Allen noticed that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device. Gate gives MITS a call and tells them they have a working interpreter for the Altair; MITS requested a demonstration. One small caveat, they didn’t actually have one.

Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter.  Although they developed the interpreter on a simulator and not the actual device, the interpreter worked flawlessly when they demonstrated it to MITS in Albuquerque, NM on March 1975. MITS agreed to distribute it, marketing it as Altair BASIC.

1978 photo of early Microsoft employees

They officially established Microsoft on April 4, 1975, with Gates as the CEO. Allen came up with the original name of “Micro-Soft,” the combination of the words microcomputer and software, as recounted in a 1995 Fortune magazine article. In August 1977 the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office, “ASCII Microsoft”. The company moved to a new home in Bellevue, Washington in January 1979. And the rest, as they say…

Birth of the PC Era

December 19, 1974: First Altair Kit Goes ON Sale

On this date in 1974 the Altair 8800 goes on sale.  The 8800 became the turning point for the home computer.  Something we take for granted now was, at the time, way over the heads of the general population.

The Altair 8800 was put out by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). It was the first ever “Do it yourself” computer system. You would get it through Popular Electronics Magazine, and then assemble it yourself. This is a turning point in home computer setup. The price for an Altair 8800 kit was $397.00 and it included Microsoft Altair BASIC.

Guts of the 8800

As the base computer used toggle switches for input and LEDs for output, it was a far cry from the personal computers, laptops, tablets and smart phones we know today. However, this little kit was one of the most important computers in history, for it inspired the first generation of entrepreneurs that created the personal computer industry.

Two examples:

A young Bill Gates and Paul Allen, excited by the possibility of small computers that could be used in the home, wrote the BASIC programming language for the Altair, their first software product which formed the basis of their future company, Microsoft.

Bill Gates

Paul Allen

Apple 1 at the Smithsonian

The Altair was also popular with the Homebrew Computing Club, where Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs began their partnership selling their own computer kit, the Apple I.

After the Altair 8800 appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine in January 1975, MITS was flooded with orders. Expecting to sell at most 800 units, MITS sold over 5,000 units by August of 1975.

And the rest, as they say, is history… Tech History.