Microsoft’s Odd Couple

LIFE 2.0 Paul Allen in his office at the headquarters of his venture-capital firm, Vulcan, in Seattle, Washington.

Adapted from Idea Man, by Paul Allen, to be published this month by Portfolio, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc.; � 2011 by the author.

My high school in Seattle, Lakeside, seemed conservative on the surface, but it was educationally progressive. We had few rules and lots of opportunities, and all my schoolmates seemed passionate about something. But the school was also cliquish. There were golfers and tennis players, who carried their rackets wherever they went, and in the winter most everyone went skiing. I?d never done any of these things, and my friends were the boys who didn?t fit into the established groups. Then, in the fall of my 10th-grade year, my passion found me.

My honors-geometry teacher was Bill Dougall, the head of Lakeside?s science and math departments. A navy pilot in World War II, Mr. Dougall had an advanced degree in aeronautical engineering, and another in French literature from the Sorbonne. In our school?s best tradition, he believed that book study wasn?t enough without real-world experience. He also realized that we?d need to know something about computers when we got to college. A few high schools were beginning to train students on traditional mainframes, but Mr. Dougall wanted something more engaging for us. In 1968 he approached the Lakeside Mothers Club, which agreed to use the proceeds from its annual rummage sale to lease a teleprinter terminal for computer time-sharing, a brand-new business at the time.

On my way to math class in McAllister Hall, I stopped by for a look. As I approached the small room, the faint clacking got louder. I opened the door and found three boys squeezed inside. There was a bookcase and a worktable with piles of manuals, scraps from notebooks, and rolled-up fragments of yellow paper tape. The students were clustered around an overgrown electric typewriter, mounted on an aluminum-footed pedestal base: a Teletype Model ASR-33 (for Automatic Send and Receive). It was linked to a GE-635, a General Electric mainframe computer in a distant, unknown office.

The Teletype made a terrific racket, a mix of low humming, the Gatling gun of the paper-tape punch, and the ka-chacko-whack of the printer keys. The room?s walls and ceiling were lined with white corkboard for soundproofing. But though it was noisy and slow, a dumb remote terminal with no display screen or lowercase letters, the ASR-33 was also state-of- the-art. I was transfixed. I sensed that you could do things with this machine.

That year, 1968, would be a watershed in matters digital. In March, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first programmable desktop calculator. In June, Robert Dennard won a patent for a one-transistor cell of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, a new and cheaper method of temporary data storage. In July, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore co-founded Intel Corporation. In December, at the legendary ?mother of all demos? in San Francisco, the Stanford Research Institute?s Douglas Engelbart showed off his original versions of a mouse, a word processor, e-mail, and hypertext. Of all the epochal changes in store over the next two decades, a remarkable number were seeded over those 10 months: cheap and reliable memory, a graphical user interface, a ?killer? application, and more.

It?s hard to convey the excitement I felt when I sat down at the Teletype. With my program written out on notebook paper, I?d type it in on the keyboard with the paper-tape punch turned on. Then I?d dial into the G.E. computer, wait for a beep, log on with the school?s password, and hit the Start button to feed the paper tape through the reader, which took several minutes.

At last came the big moment. I?d type ?RUN,? and soon my results printed out at 10 characters per second?a glacial pace next to today?s laser printers, but exhilarating at the time. It would be quickly apparent whether my program worked; if not, I?d get an error message. In either case, I?d quickly log off to save money. Then I?d fix any mistakes by advancing the paper tape to the error and correcting it on the keyboard while simultaneously punching a new tape?a delicate maneuver nowadays handled by a simple click of a mouse and a keystroke. When I achieved a working program, I?d secure it with a rubber band and stow it on a shelf.

Soon I was spending every lunchtime and free period around the Teletype with my fellow aficionados. Others might have found us eccentric, but I didn?t care. I had discovered my calling. I was a programmer.

One day early that fall, I saw a gangly, freckle-faced eighth-grader edging his way into the crowd around the Teletype, all arms and legs and nervous energy. He had a scruffy-preppy look: pullover sweater, tan slacks, enormous saddle shoes. His blond hair went all over the place. You could tell three things about Bill Gates pretty quickly. He was really smart. He was really competitive; he wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent. After that first time, he kept coming back. Many times he and I would be the only ones there.

Bill came from a family that was prominent even by Lakeside standards; his father later served as president of the state bar association. I remember the first time I went to Bill?s big house, a block or so above Lake Washington, feeling a little awed. His parents subscribed to Fortune, and Bill read it religiously. One day he showed me the magazine?s special annual issue and asked me, ?What do you think it?s like to run a Fortune 500 company?? I said I had no idea. And Bill said, ?Maybe we?ll have our own company someday.? He was 13 years old and already a budding entrepreneur.

Where I was curious to study everything in sight, Bill would focus on one task at a time with total discipline. You could see it when he programmed?he?d sit with a marker clenched in his mouth, tapping his feet and rocking, impervious to distraction. He had a unique way of typing, sort of a six-finger, sideways scrabble. There?s a famous photograph of Bill and me in the computer room not long after we first met. I?m seated on a hard-back chair at the teleprinter in my dapper green corduroy jacket and turtleneck. Bill is standing to my side in a plaid shirt, his head cocked attentively, eyes trained on the printer as I type. He looks even younger than he actually was. I look like an older brother, which was something Bill didn?t have.

Katie Holmes Jessica Cauffiel Amy Smart Amanda Swisten Aaliyah