Biography

Here's one of my original works I did for my exams so for once I really do deserve a © Chris Worfolk. If your still looking for information their is a biography on Bill's site on Microsoft.com.

It was during the spring term of 1968, at Lakeside Prep School that Bill Gates first used a computer. Though computers were still too expensive to buy, the school held a fundraiser and acquired computer time on a DEC PDP-10 owned by General Electric. This cost them several thousand dollars but the school expected this to last them a whole year. However the schools did not count on the enthusiasm of several young students.

Bill Gates, Paul Allen and several other students (of which many became Microsoft programmers) became addicted to the computer, spending all day and all night writing programs and reading all the material they could get their hands on. Soon this began to take its toll on their education. Homework was being handed in late, classes were being skipped and all the schools computer time was used up in a few weeks.

In autumn 1968, the Computer Centre Corporation opened in Seattle, offering computer time at good rates. A deal was soon struck between Lakeside Prep School and the Computer Centre Corporation that allowed the school to continue to provide computer time for their students. Gates and his friends wasted no time in exploring the new machine and soon started causing problems. They caused the system to crash several times and broke the security system. They even got banned for several weeks after hacking into the file that recorded how much computer time they were using and altered it.

In late 1968 the Lakeside programming group was formed consisting of Gates, Paul Allen and two other students from Lakeside Prep School. They wanted to apply their new computer skills to the real world. They got this chance when the Computer Centre Corporation struck a deal with them. In exchange for unlimited computer time, Gates and his friends searched the computer for bugs and weaknesses in the system. "It was when we got free time at C-Cubed (Computer Centre Corporation) that we really got into computers. I mean, they I became hardcore. It was day and night," said Gates.

The Computer Centre Corporation went out of business in March 1970. The Lakeside programmers now need a new source of computer time. Their next chance came from Information Sciences Inc. who hired them to create a payroll program. In exchange for this they would be given free computer time and royalties from the software, giving in them a source of income for the first time.

Traf-O-Data was Gates and Allen's next project creating software to help measure traffic flow. They earned approximately $20,000 from the company in total, which latest until Gates left for college.

In the autumn of 1973, Bill Gates started university at Harvard. However like at Lakeside Pre, his heart was not in his studies. In 1975 he dropped out of Harvard and Microsoft was formed.