Hard Drive - Bill Gates and the making of the Microsoft Empire 1

I began reading on Hard Drive – Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace & Jim Erickson. In the first chapter of the book, the authors wrote about accounts in the early years of Bill Gates. Bill Gates is presented as being really smart, outshadowing his peers of similar age. One account of this was of Bill Gates at 11 years old when he enrolled in a confirmation class taught by a man named Turner. One Sunday morning, Turner threw down his yearly challenge to the class – he would buy dinner at the Space Needle Restaurant for anyone who memorized the Sermon on the Mount.

The authors write that Gates recited the passage nonstop from the beginning, never missing a line. Turner was astounded. No, one in all his years in the ministry, had been able to make it through the entire passage without stumbling over at least a few words or lines.

I haven’t tried memorizing the sermon on the mount myself, but looking at the passage online, I can say it is pretty difficult to memorize the stuff. I know of fellow Christians who have a knack for referencing the exact part of the Bible where they quote their scripture, and I am rather impressed with this. Personally, I don’t memorize the parts of the bible where the verse comes from, because I think I can just use a search function when I want to find where the verse or story came from.

The authors wrote that even as a child Gates had an obsessive personality and a compulsive need to be the best. One of the first major assignments in his fourth grade class was to write a four or five page report on a particular part of the human body. Gates wrote more than 30 pages.

He also joined Troop 16 of the Boys Scouts where his father had been an Eagle Scout as a youth. One year during a Boy Scout jamboree – where Scouts from around the state gather to show off knot tying and fire building skills – Gates and a friend rounded up computer equipment and set up a hands-on demonstration of what a computer could do. At that time, few of the boys had even heard of a computer, much less used one.

It seems like Bill Gates did function very well socially during his time in the Boys Scouts and achieved quite a lot during his stint. I joined the Pelandok Scouts Unit during my high school days at St Joseph’s Institution because I was keen on the idea of learning atavistic survival skills like camping. And I did enjoy participating in the fund-raising event known as Scouts Job Week where scouts go around visiting households to do jobs like household chores in order to raise funds. But I didn’t get along very well socially with my peers, and there were seniors who led who made the scouting experience bad with their penchant for scolding and punishing the scouts group by making us do push-ups or ‘change parades’ where the scouts have to change from their scouts attire into their PT attire and back again. I felt that they lost sight of what the meaning of scouts should be, with their overemphasis on discipline that it derailed the scouting experience.

Bill Gates’ parents decided to enroll him in a private school called Lakeside as he was far ahead of his peers in public school. He got the opportunity to learn more about the computer when the mothers of the students in the school decided to pull together funds to buy a computer, which was then an expensive gadget that was used only in high-end government institutions like NASA. It is at Lakeside where Bill Gates met his future Microsoft partner, Paul Allen. The two were quite the computer junkies, and would skip gym classes to tool around with the computer, find bugs, and write software programs.

I think that it was a confluence of both opportunity and talent for Bill Gates which made him what he is today. He had the opportunity to be amongst the privilege to work with a computer in those days, and he had the passion for computers. I am thinking of an example in Singapore who similarly spot such opportunities and minted their fortunes in the tech industry. What comes to mind is the founder of the Creative enterprise, Sim Wong Hoo, who invented and marketed his sound card hardware internationally and took advantage of the booming hardware market during the computer revolution.

I do see the likes of these tech whizzes during my junior college days. They had all the burgeoning ideas on how to craft the next piece of technological marvel. But they have yet to make their marks in the world. Personally, I am not very much a technology geek, and wasn’t too fond of programming during my high school days. But I would like to know what opportunities lie out from which I can make an honest profit.