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

possessed students of a cabalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers. . .
    Weizenbaum was describing young men at MIT in the late sixties, at the artificial intelligence lab. The passage in his book became infamous in computer circles. Hackers considered it unfounded and vicious. They saw the computer as a revolutionary tool that could change the world. But Weizenbaum considered it dehumanizing. Young men addicted to The Machine had no sense of limits, he said. They had tunnel vision, unable to see the real world.
    Mary and Bill, Jr., were beginning to see this dehumanizing, addictive behavior in their son. Although they had never pushed him in any direction before, they did so now. They ordered him to give up computers, at least for a while.
    “It was a combination of things,” Gates explained, “where people thought, hey, maybe we are out of control, and people thought we weren’t paying attention to anything else, and that it was a kind of abnormal situation. So my parents said, ‘Why don’t you give this stuff up.’ So I did.”
    It was no big deal, he said. “I just went off and did some other stuff.. . science, math. There was an infinite amount to read. There was at least nine months there when I did nothing
    with computers.”
    Read he did, with the same kind of commitment he had made to computers. He consumed a number of biographies Franklin Roosevelt’s and Napoleon’s, among others—to understand, he said, how the great figures of history thought. He read business and science books, along with novels. His favorites were Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace. He would later recite long passages from those two books to girlfriends. Holden Caulfield, the main character in Catcher in the Rye, became one of his heroes.
    And so Bill Gates, the biggest computer junkie in the Lakeside computer room, swore off computers for nearly a year, from the end of the ninth grade through the first half of the tenth. “I tried to be normal,” he said, “the best I could.”
    As a student at Lakeside School, Bill Gates was never just one of the boys. His drive, intensity, attitude, and intelligence made him stand out from the crowd. In fact, nothing about Bill Gates was normal. Gates used to be teased at Lakeside because he was clearly so much brighter than the other students. Even in an environment like Lakeside, where smart kids tended to command respect, anyone as smart as Gates got teased by some of the others. In a school carpool, Gates, who was younger and smaller than the other boys, always sat in the back and was usually left out of conversations. Occasionally, he would attempt to win their approval by telling a joke. When he did, one older boy who always sat in the front usually turned around, put his hand in Gates face, spread his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, and with a smirk, told him, “Small man . . . small joke.”
    After a nine month hiatus, Gates resumed his love affair with the computer. It didn’t take long for other students to notice that the same kids always seemed to crowd the small computer room at Lakeside. The floor was often littered with folded, spindled, or mutilated punch cards, and punched out pieces of teletype tape. The teletype was usually hammering away. Gates and his friends often sat at a long table, drinking from two-liter bottles of Coke, playing chess or the ancient Chinese game of Go to while away the time until the computer had finished the job it was running. With all the time he spent in the computer room, Gates became a master of Go and could beat anyone in the school.
    “Gates