About Bill GatesFrom Galegroup.com
Convergence William Henry Gates was fifteen in 1970 and, by his own admission, the smartest kid in Seattle, Washington. He attended the progressive Lakeside School, a private high school that had a computer club. There Gates met the principal figures with whom he worked during the 1970s to form what arguably became within twenty years the most successful corporation in the world. Lakeside Programmers Group At Lakeside, Gates, with his friends Paul Allen and Ric Wieland, had time-sharing access to a mainframe computer. Using a programming language called BASIC, developed at Dartmouth University in the late 1950s, they could type in a set of instructions and have the machine run routines that displayed results on a teletype terminal. When he was in the eighth grade Gates and his friends wrote programs in BASIC for simple games, such as ticktacktoe, and for more useful computations, such as a conversion of a number from a base-ten system into a binary, hexadecimal, or any other base-number configuration. By the time Gates was a senior in high school, it was commonly accepted that the Lakeside Programmers Group, the school computer club, included students with remarkable ability to understand computer logic and turn it to practical uses. Gates was regarded as the best of the Lakeside programmers, followed closely by Allen and Wieland. They traded programming services to a local corporation for free time-sharing computing access, and, by the time he graduated from high school in 1973, Gates was writing class-scheduling programs for the school and serving as a consultant to private companies with computing problems, notably TRW in Canada.