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news for Computer Center Corporation, which was trying to pay bills, attract new customers, and keep old ones. Whenever the computer went down, other paying customers were also knocked off the system. Worse, the computer “lost” everything it had been working on—a case of electronic Alzheimer’s. When the machine came back up, its memory banks were blank.
    Frustrated programmers at C-Cubed eventually figured out what Gates was doing wrong. When the computer asked him the name of his program, he was supposed to type only the word, “Bill.” The string of characters he was typing, “Old program name is Bill,” was too long for the machine, an anomaly that caused it to crash.
    It was an exhilarating feeling for Gates, knowing he could single-handedly bring down the huge computer by typing a string of letters. He soon learned, however, just how easy it was to crash the PDP-10.
    The software that Digital Equipment Corporation supplied with its PDP-10 was “flaky” at best. On good days, the C-Cubed system might stay up four hours before crashing. On bad days, when there were lots of paying customers on line, it was usually down within half an hour. Clearly, something would have to be done if the firm were going to stay in business.
    “We knew we had this reliability problem,” recalled Steve Russell, one of the programmers working for C-Cubed. “We knew how to turn the crashes on and off to some extent . . . simply by having lots of users and not having lots of users. What we wanted to do was get a herd of friendly users that we could turn on and off, so that we could turn them on to test the system and turn them off when we wanted the system to be reliable, because there were paying customers on the machines making money for us.”
    So the company hired a herd of friendly users, and they became the unofficial “night shift.” C-Cubed offered Gates and the other Lakeside computer junkies an opportunity to try to crash the system. In exchange, they would get all the free computer time they wanted. They were simply to come down to C- Cubed in the evening and on weekends, after the paying customers were off the computer, log onto the system and have fun. The only requirement was that they were to carefully document each “bug” they found that caused the system to crash.
    Computer bugs were appropriately named. In August of 1945, while working on an experimental computer known as the Mark 1 at Harvard University, a circuit malfunctioned, and a research assistant went looking for the problem in the tangled mess of vacuum tubes and wires. He found the problem, and removed it with a pair of tweezers—it was a 2-inch long moth.
    “From then on,” Grace Hopper, a member of the Mark 1 research team, told Time magazine in 1984, “when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.” (The famous moth is preserved at the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia.)
    Finding bugs in the C-Cubed computer system proved to be a fertile field of investigation for Gates and the other boys. They were given what became known as the “Problem Report Book,” a journal of their discoveries and investigations. Over the next six months, the “bug” book grew to more than 300 pages. Most of the entries were made by just two boys—Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
    Computer Center Corporation was located in the city’s University District, in what had been an old Buick dealership. After school, Gates would rush home to Laurelhurst for dinner, then run to nearby Children’s Hospital to catch the No. 30 bus for the short ride to C-Cubed.
    It was often past midnight when the boys finished their work. Gates would usually walk home. Sometimes, one of the parents would come by and drive all the boys home.
    “It was when we got free time at C-Cubed that we really got into computers,” Gates said. “I mean, then I became hard core. It was day and night.”
    At this point, Gates was 13 years old, and finishing