The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 85

Gates and Allen came to appreciate the importance of the computer’s operating system, which was akin to its nervous system. As Allen explained, “It does the logistical work that allows the central processing unit to compute: shifting from program to program; allocating storage to files; moving data to and from modems and disk drives and printers.” The operating system software for the PDP-10 was called TOPS-10, and Russell allowed Gates and Allen to read, but not take home, the manuals. They would sometimes stay until dawn absorbing them.

In order to fully understand the operating system, Gates realized, they would have to get access to its source code, which programmers used to specify each action to be performed. But the source code was tightly held by the top engineers and was off-limits to the Lakeside boys. That made it all the more of a Holy Grail. One weekend they discovered that printouts of the programmers’ work were discarded into a big Dumpster in the back of the building. So Allen clasped his hands to give Gates a boost—“He couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds,” Allen said—and he dove into the container to rummage among the coffee grinds and garbage to find the stacks of stained and crumpled fanfold printouts. “We took that precious hoard back to the terminal room and pored over it for hours,” said Allen. “I had no Rosetta Stone to help me, and understood maybe one or two lines out of ten, but I was blown away by the source code’s tightly written elegance.”

That led Gates and Allen to want to drill down a level deeper. In order to grasp the architecture of the operating system they would have to master assembly code, the underlying commands—“Load B. Add C. Store in A.”—that directly spoke to the machine’s hardware. Allen recalled, “Seeing my interest, Steve Russell took me aside, handed me an assembler manual bound in glossy plastic, and told me, ‘You need to read this.’?”26 He and Gates would read the manuals and sometimes still be confused. At that point Russell would hand them another one and say, “Now it’s time to read this.” After a while, they became masters of the complexities, and the simplicities, that can make an operating system so potent and graceful.

When the DEC software was finally determined to be stable, the Lakeside boys lost their right to use the PDP-10 for free. “They basically said, ‘Okay you monkeys, go home,’?” Gates said.27 The Lakeside Mothers Club came to the rescue, at least to some extent. It funded personal accounts for the boys, but there was a time and dollar limit. Gates and Allen knew they could never live within the limit, so they tried to beat the system by getting hold of an administrator’s password, hacking into the internal accounting system file, and breaking the encryption code. That allowed them to tap into free accounts. But before they could wreak much havoc, they got caught: their math teacher found their roll of Teletype paper with all the account numbers and passwords. The matter went all the way up to the top echelons at C-Cubed and DEC, and a stern delegation visited the school for a meeting in the principal’s office. Gates and Allen hung their heads, feigning deep contrition, but it didn’t work. They were banned from using the system for the rest of the semester and the entire summer.

“I swore off computers for a while, and I tried to be normal,” said Gates. “I decided to prove I could get all A’s without ever taking a textbook home. Instead I read biographies of Napoleon and novels like Catcher in the Rye.”28

For almost a year the Lakeside Programming Group was on hiatus. Then, in the fall of 1970, the school started buying time on a PDP-10 from a company in Portland, Oregon, called Information Sciences, Inc. (ISI). It was expensive, $15 an hour. Gates and his friends quickly learned to hack in for free, but once again they got caught. So they took another approach: they sent ISI a letter offering their services in return for free time.

The executives at ISI were dubious, so the four boys went down to Portland carrying printouts and program codes to show how good they were. “We outlined our experience and submitted our resumes,” Allen recalled. Gates, who had just turned sixteen, wrote his in pencil on lined notebook paper. They got an assignment to write a payroll program that would produce paychecks with correct deductions and taxes.29

That’s when the first cracks appeared in the Gates-Allen relationship. The program had to be written not in BASIC (Gates’s favorite language) but in COBOL, the more complex language that had been developed by Grace Hopper and others as a standard for businesses. Ric Weiland knew COBOL and wrote a program editor for the ISI system, which Allen quickly mastered. At that point the two older boys decided that they didn’t need Gates or Kent Evans. “Paul and Rick decided there wasn’t enough work to go around and said, we don’t need you guys,” Gates recalled. “They thought that they would do the work and get the computer time.”30

Gates was frozen out for six weeks, during which time he read algebra books and avoided Allen and Weiland. “And then Paul and Rick realized, oh shit, this is a pain,” said Gates. The program required not only coding skills but someone who could figure out social security deductions, federal taxes, and state unemployment insurance. “So then they say, ‘hey, we’re in trouble on this thing, can you come back and help?’?” That’s when Gates pulled a power play that would define his future relationship with Allen. As Gates described it, “That’s when I say, ‘Okay. But I’m going to be in charge. And I’ll get used to being in charge, and it’ll be hard to deal with me from now on unless I’m in charge. If you put me in charge, I’m in charge of this and anything else we do.’?”31

And so he was, from then on. When he returned to the fold, Gates insisted on turning the Lakeside Programming Group into a legal partnership, using an agreement drawn up with his father’s help. And though partnerships generally don’t have presidents, Gates started calling himself that. He was sixteen. Then he divvied up the $18,000 worth of computer time that they were earning, screwing Allen in the process. “I gave 4/11ths to myself, 4/11ths to Kent, 2/11ths to Rick, and 1/11th to Paul,” Gates recalled. “The guys thought it was really funny that I did 11ths. But Paul had been so lazy and had never done anything and I was just trying to decide, okay, there’s a factor of two between what Paul did and what Rick did, and then there’s more than a factor of two between what Rick did and what Kent and I did.”32

At first Gates tried to give himself slightly more than Evans as well. “But Kent would never let me get away with that.” Evans was as savvy about business as Gates was. When they finished the payroll program, Evans made a note in the meticulous journal that he kept: “Tuesday we go to Portland to deliver the program and as they have put it, ‘hammer out an agreement for future work.’ Everything so far has been done for its educational benefits and for large amounts of expensive computer time. Now we want to get some monetary benefits, too.”33 The negotiations were tense, and for a while ISI tried to hold back some of the computer time payment because they objected to the lack of documentation. But with the help of a letter written by Gates’s father, the dispute was resolved and a new deal was negotiated.

In the fall of 1971, at the beginning of Gates’s junior year, Lakeside merged with a girls’ school. This created a class-scheduling nightmare, so the administrators asked Gates and Evans to write a program to solve it. Gates knew that a school schedule had scores of variables—required courses, teacher schedules, classroom space, honors classes, electives, staggered sections, double-period labs—that would make it extremely difficult, so he declined. Instead a teacher took on the challenge, while Gates and Evans taught his computer class for him. But that January, as he was still struggling to produce a workable program, the teacher was killed when a small plane he was riding in crashed. Gates and Evans agreed to take over the task. They spent hours in the computer room, often sleeping there overnight, trying to write a new program from scratch. In May they were still struggling, trying to finish so that it could be ready for the next school year.