Episode Details

What I learned from reading Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. 

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Microsoft had become the first software company to sell more than a billion dollars worth of software in a single year. 

Gates was the undisputed mastermind of that success, a brilliant technocrat, ruthless salesman, and manipulative businessman. 

Gates had slammed his fist into his palm and vowed to put several of his major software competitors out of business. By 1991, many of those competitors were in full retreat. 

I can do anything I put my mind to. 

Aggressive and stimulated by conflict; prone to change mood quickly; a dominating personality with outstanding powers of leadership. 

Mary Gates, in describing her son, has said that he has pretty much done what he wanted since the age of eight. 

Even as a child Gates had an obsessive personality and a compulsive need to be the best. 

Everything Bill did, he did to the max. 

Everything he did, he did competitively and not simply to relax. He was a very driven individual. 

Gates was immediately hooked. He found he had to compete for time on the computer with a handful of others who were similarly drawn to the room as if by a powerful gravitational force. Among them was Paul Allen. 

Gates devoured everything he could get his hands on concerning computers and how to communicate with them, often teaching himself as he went. 

Gates and a couple of other boys broke into the PDP-10 security system and obtained access to the company’s accounting files. They found their personal accounts and substantially reduced the amount of time the computer showed they had used. 

“It was when we got that free time that we really got into computers,” Gates said. “Then I became hardcore. It was day and night.” Gates was 13 years old. 

Although he was only in the ninth grade, he already seemed obsessed with the computer, ignoring everything else, staying out all night. 

He consumed biographies to understand how the great figures in history thought. 

If you had asked anybody at Lakeside, ‘Who is the real genius among geniuses?’ everyone would have said ‘Bill Gates.’

He was obnoxious, he was sure of himself, he was aggressively, intimidatingly smart. 

He had a hard-nosed, confrontational style. His intensity at times boiled over into raw, unthrottled emotion. 

To those who knew him best Gates was hardly the social outcast he may have appeared to be from a distance. He had a sense of humor and adventure. 

He was a risk taker, a guy who liked to have fun and who was fun to be with. 

He had an immense range of knowledge and interests and could talk at length on any number of subjects. 

Although Gates may not have known what he was going to do with his life, he seemed confident that whatever he did would make him a lot of money. He made such a prediction about his future on several occasions. 

He and Paul Allen began to talk about forming their own software company. They shared the same vision that one day the computer would be as commonplace in the home as a television set and that these computers would need software—their software. 

Bill Gates would later tell a friend he went to Harvard to learn from people smarter than he was and left disappointed. 

That Gates would fall asleep in class was not surprising. He was living on the edge. It was not unusual for him to go as long as three days without sleep. 

His habit was to do 36 hours or more at a stretch, collapse for ten hours, then go out, get a pizza, and go back at it. And if that meant he was starting again at three o’clock in the morning, so be it. 

Gates and Allen were convinced the computer industry was abo