Read Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire for Free Online

all-consuming,” said the Reverend Marvin Evans, Kent’s father. “After Lakeside got that computer, Bill and Kent were in constant trouble with the faculty. Some of Kent’s journals demonstrate this. Everything was late—chemistry workbooks were late, physics workbooks were late, history and English themes were late.”
    Wright, amused by the antics of his young charges, adopted the code name, “GYMFLKE,” to log on to the computer, an inside joke on Gates, Evans, and some of the others who “flaked out” of gym to work on The Machine. While the kids all became experts at finding confidential user passwords and breaking computer security systems, none of them, Gates included, discovered Wright’s secret password.
    Although Gates was only in the lower school, before long some of the older boys were coming to him for help with the computer. Among them was Paul Allen, who would egg Gates on, challenging him to solve a difficult problem.
    “Paul thought I had this attitude like I understood things,” Gates said. “So when he got stuck he would say, ‘Hey, I bet you can’t figure this out!’ He would kind of challenge me . . . and it was pretty hard stuff.”
    As they spent more and more time together in the computer room, Gates and Allen became friends. One day, Gates went to Allen’s home, only to be amazed by Allen’s collection of sci-fi books.
    “He had read four times as much as I had,” recalled Gates. “And he had all these other books that explained things. So I would ask him, ‘How do guns work? How do nuclear reactors work?’ Paul was good at explaining stuff. Later, we did some math stuff and physics stuff together. That’s how we got to be friends.”.
    It wasn’t surprising that Allen should be well read. For more than twenty years his father, Kenneth Allen, was associate director of libraries for the University of Washington.
    Although Allen could be just as intense and competitive as Gates, he was surprisingly soft-spoken, with an equally soft handshake. Allen talks so softly, in fact, that when reporters interview him, his voice sometimes fails to automatically activate their tape recorders.
    The other kids at Lakeside liked Paul Allen. To many of his classmates, he seemed more personable than some of the others who had taken over the computer room. It was easy to like the boy with the blond Fu Manchu mustache and aviator sunglasses who habitually carried a briefcase. There was no pretentiousness in Allen, none of the I’m-smarter-than-you attitude.
    “Paul was cool,” said a classmate who was not one of the computer room crowd. “He was a nerd who didn’t look like a nerd. He was always more approachable and friendlier than Bill. . . . You would run into him in the hallways and he would actually stop and talk to you.”
    Allen and Gates not only spent a lot of time working together in the computer room but also a lot of time talking about the future of computer technology.
    “We both were fascinated with the different possibilites of what you could do with computers,” Allen said. “It was a vast
    area of knowledge we were trying to absorb. . . . Bill and I always had big dreams of what we could do with computers.” While Allen liked to read magazines like Popular Electronics, Gates read the business magazines that came into his family’s home. As a prelude to doing business in the “real world,” Gates and Allen formed the Lakeside Programmers Group, along with two of their friends, Richard Weiland and Kent Evans. Weiland and Allen were in the tenth grade, while Gates and Evans were in the eighth grade. The Lakeside Programmers Group was dedicated to finding money-making opportunities to use The Machine in the real world.
    “I was the mover,” Gates said. “I was the guy who said, ‘Let’s call the real world and try to sell something to it.’ ”
    As it turned out, the real world called them first. And what a deal it was—all the free computer time they