Hackers
I swore off computers for about a year and a half—the end of the ninth grade and all of the tenth. I tried to be normal, the best I could.
–Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft Corporation
Had the personal-computer revolution waited for action from the mainframe-computer and minicomputer companies, the PC might still be a thing of the future. But there were those who would not wait patiently for something to happen, and their very impatience led them to take steps toward creating a revolution of their own. Some of those revolutionaries were incredibly young.
In the late 1960s, before David Ahl lost all patience with DEC, Paul Allen and his school friends at Seattle’s private Lakeside School were working at a company called Computer Center Corporation (or “C Cubed” to Allen and his friends). The boys volunteered their time to help find bugs in the work of DEC system programmers. They learned fast and were getting a little cocky. Soon they were adding touches of their own to make the programs run faster. Bill Gates wasn’t shy about criticizing certain DEC programmers, and pointed out those who repeatedly made the same mistakes.
Hacking
Perhaps Gates got too cocky. Certainly the sense of power he got from controlling those giant computers exhilarated him. One day he began experimenting with the computer security systems. On time-sharing computer systems, such as the DEC TOPS-10 system that Gates knew well, many users shared the same machine and used it simultaneously, via a terminal connected to a mainframe or minicomputer that was often kept in a locked room. Safeguards had to be built into the systems to prevent one user from invading another user’s data files or “crashing” a program—thereby causing it to fail and terminate—or worse yet, crashing the operating system and bringing the whole computer system to a halt.
Gates learned how to invade the DEC TOPS-10 system and, later, other systems. He became a hacker, an expert in the underground art of subverting computer-system security. His baby face and bubbly manner masked a very clever and determined young man who could, by typing just 14 characters on a terminal, bring an entire TOPS-10 operating system to its knees.
He grew into a master of electronic mischief. Hacking brought Gates fame in certain circles, but it also brought him grief. After learning how easily he could crash the DEC operating system, Gates cast about for bigger challenges. The DEC system had no human operator and could be breached without anyone noticing and sounding an alarm. On other systems, human operators continually monitored activity.
For instance, Control Data Corporation had a nationwide network of computers called Cybernet, which CDC claimed was completely reliable at all times. For Gates, that claim amounted to a dare.
A CDC computer at the University of Washington had connections to Cybernet. Gates set to work studying the CDC machines and software; he studied the specifications for the network as though he were cramming for a final exam.
“There are these peripheral processors,” he explained to Paul Allen. “The way you fool the system is you get control of one of those peripheral processors and then you use that to get control of the mainframe. You’re slowly invading the system.”
Gates was invading the CDC hive dressed as a worker bee. The mainframe operator observed the activity of the peripheral processor that Gates was controlling, but only electronically in the form of messages sent to the operator’s terminal. Gates then figured out how to gain control of all the messages the peripheral processor sent out. He hoped to trick the operator by maintaining a veneer of normalcy while he cracked the system wide open.
The scheme worked.
Gates gained control of a peripheral processor, electronically insinuated himself into the main computer, bypassed the human operator without arousing suspicion, and planted the same “special” program in all the component computers of the system. His tinkering caused them to all crash simultaneously.
Gates was amused by his exploits, but CDC was not, and he hadn’t covered his tracks as well as he thought he had. CDC caught him and sternly reprimanded him. A humiliated Bill Gates swore off computers for more than a year.
Despite the dangers, hacking was the high art of the technological subculture; all the best talent was hacking. When Gates wanted to establish his credentials a few years later, he didn’t display some clever program he had written. He just said, “I crashed the CDC,” and everyone knew he was good.
BASIC
When Intel’s 8008 microprocessor came out, Paul Allen was ready to build something with it. He lured Gates back into computing by getting an Intel 8008 manual and telling his friend, “We should write a BASIC for the 8008.”
BASIC was a simple yet high-level programming language that had become popular on minicomputers over the previous decade. Allen was proposing that they write a BASIC interpreter—a translator that would convert statements from BASIC input into sequences of 8008 instructions. That way, anyone could control the microprocessor by programming in the BASIC language. It was an appealing idea because controlling the chip directly via its instruction set was, as Allen could see, a painfully laborious process.
Gates was skeptical. The 8008 was the first 8-bit microprocessor, and it had severe limitations.
“It was built for calculators,” Gates told Allen, although he wasn’t quite accurate in his statement. But Gates eventually agreed to lend a hand, and came up with the $360 needed to buy what Gates believed was the first 8008 sold through a distributor. Then, their plan somehow was diverted: they got themselves a third enthusiast, Paul Gilbert, to help with the hardware design, and together the trio built a machine around the 8008.
The machine the youngsters built was not a computer by a long shot, but it was complicated enough to cause them to set aside BASIC for a while. They constructed a machine to generate traffic-flow statistics using data collected by a sensor they had installed in a rubber tube strung across a highway. They figured there would be a sizable market for such a device. Allen wrote the development software, which allowed them to simulate the operation of their machine on a computer, and Gates used the development software to write the actual data-logging software that their machine required.
Traf-O-Data
It took Gates, Allen, and Gilbert almost a year to get the traffic-analysis machine running. When they finally did, in 1972, they started a company called Traf-O-Data—a name that Allen is quick to point out was Gates’s idea—and began pitching their new product to city engineers.
Traf-O-Data was not the brilliant success they had hoped for. Perhaps some of the engineers balked at buying computer equipment from kids. Gates, who did most of the talking, was then 16 and looked younger. At the same time, the state of Washington began to offer no-cost traffic-processing services to all county and city traffic controllers, and Allen and Gates found themselves competing against a free service.
Soon after this early failure, Allen left for college, leaving Gates temporarily at loose ends. TRW, a huge corporation that produced software products in Vancouver, Washington, had heard about the work Gates and Allen did for C Cubed and shortly thereafter offered them jobs in a software-development group.
At something like $30,000 a year, the offer was too good for the two students to pass up. Allen came back from college, Gates got a leave of absence from high school, and they went to work. For a year and a half, Gates and Allen lived a computer nut’s dream. They learned a great deal more than they had by working at C Cubed or as the inventors of Traf-O-Data. Programmers can be protective of their hard-earned knowledge, but Gates knew how to use his youth to win over the older TRW experts. He was, as he put it, “nonthreatening.” After all, he was just a kid.
Gates and Allen also discovered the financial benefits that such work can bring. Gates bought a speedboat, and the two frequently went water-skiing on nearby lakes. But programming offered other rewards that appealed to Gates and Allen far more than their increasingly fat bank accounts. Clearly, they had been bitten by the bug. They had worked late nights at C Cubed for no financial gain, and pushed themselves at TRW harder than anyone had asked them to. Something in the clean precision of computer logic and the sportsmanship in the game of programming was irresistible.
The project they worked on at TRW eventually fizzled out, but it had been a profitable experience for the two hackers. It wasn’t until Christmas 1974, after Gates went off to Harvard and Allen took a job with Honeywell, that the bug bit them once more, and this time the disease proved incurable.