Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen has a memoir called "Idea Man" coming out today. In it, he reveals some amazing stories about his friend Bill Gates.
Early excerpts from the book portrayed Gates as a tough negotiator who talked Allen into receiving a smaller share of the company they founded together.
But the memoir also contains some lighter anecdotes about Gates in his childhood and the early days of Microsoft. If you're only familiar with Gates in his elder-statesman charity role, you may not recognize the hard-charging thrill seeker who built the most profitable tech company in history.
In high school, he went dumpster diving to try and get source code.
In high school, Gates and Allen honed their programming skills on a DEC minicomputer owned by a local company, C-Cubed. But as students, they didn't have access to as much information as the company's employees, which frustrated them. So at night, Allen would boost the smaller Gates up to the top of the company's dumpsters, where he'd look for interesting stuff. Once, they found a printout of the TOPS-10 source code, and it unlocked a lot of secrets.
They also hacked the company's accounting file to try and get free computing time.
As the charges mounted up for their borrowed computer time, Gates and Allen began looking for a way to access one of the free accounts at C-Cubed. They somehow got access to an administrator password, and used it to steal the company's internal accounting file. (Allen doesn't go into detail about how they got the password.) They were hoping to decrypt the file to get one of the free accounts, but they got caught and the company booted them.
He wrote his high school's scheduling program to book him into an English class with all girls.
One summer, Gates contracted to write a class scheduling program for his high school. He made sure to "preload" himself into an English class with a dozen girls and no other boys.
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