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

manuals, with instructions to return them the next morning. Instead of going home, the boys would remain at C-Cubed all night reading.
    Gates and Allen stood out from the other kids, Russell recalled, because of their enthusiasm. “They also seemed to have a lot more interest in breaking the system than the others.” Gates earned a reputation at C-Cubed as an expert in the art of breaking into other computer security systems. He was particularly good at finding a bug known as the “one liner.” This was a pathological string of characters that could be typed on one line, allowing Gates to take over the system or cause it to crash. Legend has it that Gates was severely reprimanded at C-Cubed for breaking into security systems. However, other than the one time he altered his account from Lakeside, those stories are apocryphal. The company encouraged Gates and the other boys to try to poke around in files they were not supposed to be able to get into. After all, C-Cubed couldn’t fix a security leak unless it knew about it. Digital had supplied an elaborate security system with the PDP-10, for which the C-Cubed staff added a few bells and whistles of their own. They wanted to know if someone was able to get past the security system, and they were more than happy to have Gates try to do this. He did so with the knowledge and permission of C-Cubed.
    “We wanted to know about these bugs so we could get rid of them,” Russell said.
    Another programmer at C-Cubed, Dick Gruen, said, I would not call it breaking in if I said, ‘See if you can find a way around this.’ I’d call it asking people to see whether the watchman was doing his job. The distinction is they were not stealing anything from us, and they were doing it not just with our approval but on our behalf. We wanted them to tell us about holes
    that they found.”
    Despite the work of Gates, Allen, and the other kids from Lakeside, DEC continued to have problems with the multi-user software it used. It would take another seven years before all the bugs were gone. By then, C-Cubed was no longer in existence, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen were a lot more famous than Steve Russell.
    Computer Center Corporation first began struggling in late 1969; in March of 1970 the company went out of business.
    Gates was finishing up the ninth grade when C-Cubed went under. When it did, he made the first of what would be many smart, profitable deals while at Lakeside. In the process, he showed that when it came to business, he didn’t allow anything, even friendship, to stand in the way.
    Without discussing the matter with Allen and Weiland, their partners in the Lakeside Programmers Group, Gates and Evans negotiated to buy the valuable DEC computer tapes from C- Cubed at a cut-rate price. They hid the tapes in the Lakeside teletype machine. When an angry Allen found out, he took the tapes. Gates and Evans threatened legal action, despite the fact that they were barely teenagers.
    “There was definitely some tension there,” Allen said, “but it got resolved.” Gates and Evans eventually sold the tapes and made a nice profit.
    Mary and Bill, Jr., were not pleased with such shenanigans. They became increasingly concerned about their son. The Machine seemed to them to have an almost supernatural hold on him. Although he was only in the ninth grade, he already seemed obsessed with the computer, ignoring everything else, staying out all night. Gates was turning into what MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum, in his book Computer Power and Human Reason, described as a computer bum:
    ‘Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pore like