Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by Erickson wallace Read Free Book Online

up the eighth grade.
    “We stayed up until all hours of the night. ... It was a fun time,” recalled Allen.
    Gates and Allen not only looked for bugs but they also looked for any information that might help them learn more about computers, operating systems, and software. Allen would hoist Gates on garbage cans so he could poke around for important tidbits of information left behind by the “day shift.”
    “I’d get the notes out with the coffee grounds on them and study the operating systems,” Gates said.
    Kent Evans was often there late into the night with Gates and Allen, as was Rick Weiland. After four or five hours working in front of a computer, the boys would send out for pizza and Coke. It was a hacker’s heaven.
    Occasionally, a tall, quiet, bearded fellow by the name of Gary Kildall dropped by in the evenings to use the computers and talk to some of the programmers. Kildall was finishing work on his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Washington. Ten years later, he would fumble one of the biggest business opportunities of the personal computer revolution and in the process help to make Bill Gates a very rich man.
    The ground rules set down by C-Cubed for the night shift were pretty straightforward. The boys could use the system as much as they wanted, at no charge. They were encouraged to try to crash the system, and when it went down, they were to tell C-Cubed what they had input when it crashed. The deal was they could find any bug once, but only once. C-Cubed would then “de-bug” that part of the program.
    “On occasion we had to give some verbal reprimands for violating our rules, which was using the same bug- more than once before we fixed it,” said Steve Russell. “Since we were giving them time, they had considerable motivation to play the game our way.”
    Russell, in his early thirties, was there at night to ride herd on the boys.
    “Usually, when I stuck my nose in on them, I’d get asked a question or five, and my natural inclination was to answer questions at considerable length,” he said. “They got some useful info from that.”
    Steve Russell was famous as a computer programmer, and the kids eagerly plied him for information. Russell had gone to college at Dartmouth but left in 1958 to work as a computer programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where professor John McCarthy had set up an artifical intelligence research center in order to get funding from the federal government. It was McCarthy, an absent-minded professor and master mathematician who came up with the term “artificial intelligence,” or AI. He later went to Stanford’s AI research center on the West Coast, and Russell followed.
    In 1961, using a PDP-1, the first in Digital’s PDP series of computers, Russell had hacked out the first computer video game called “Space Wars.” The PDP-1 had a CRT or cathode ray tube screen. Russell worked for hours just to produce a dot on the screen, which would be commanded to change directions and accelerate by flipping toggle switches on the front of the computer. Eventually, his game took shape—a battle in outer space involving two rocket ships, each with 31 torpedoes. (Russell was another big science fiction fan.) Random dots on the screen represented stars. A subsequent program turned the stars into constellations. Other hackers improved on his game. A player could jump into hyperspace with the flick of a switch.
    Space Wars became the mother of all computer games. Before long, a generation of new games followed.
    At Stanford, Russell worked on multi-user computer systems, using DEC s PDP-6. C-Cubed was created to take the next version of that multi-user system, the PDP-10, and make a commercial service out of it. Russell was recruited by the C-Cubed company from Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Research Center in late 1968 because of his experience with multi-user computer systems.
    Russell sometimes gave Gates and Allen computer