In my reading of Hard Drive, Bill Gates and the making of
the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson, the authors accounted
some aspects of Bill Gates life in his pre-Microsoft days which I found
interesting.
1. At Pg 56 – “Although Gates may not have decided what
he was going to do with his life when he entered Harvard, to those who knew him
there was little doubt about his real passion. He worked for weeks during his
first year there on a BASIC program for a computer baseball game, which require
that he figure out highly complex algorithms that he would represent figures on
the computer screen hitting, throwing, and catching a baseball. Even when he
was sound asleep under his electric blanket, Gates was dreaming about
computers. Once, about three o’clock in the morning, Gates began talking in his
sleep, repeating over and over again, “One comma, one comma, one comma, one
comma…”
Gates entered Harvard as a law undergraduate under the
influence of his father who was an attorney at Seattle. His interest seems to
be more garnered towards computer and business though. It’s interesting to
learn that Bill Gates had a hand in building up the BASIC program used to code
computer softwares. I can remember being introduced to BASIC when I was a
child. It has that characteristic blue screen where codes are typed into. And
at the end of typing in the codes, you press the ‘run’ function to execute the
code on the MS-DOS.
2. Pg 57 – “No one who knew Gates at Harvard can recall
him ever dating anyone while he was there. He did see on young woman
occasionally when he returned home on holiday breaks to Seattle, but they were
not romantically involved. The woman was Karen Gloyd, a freshman at Whitman
College in Washington State. Gloyd was a couple years younger than gates,
having entered college early, at age 16. They met through their parents. Her
stepfather was on the state bar association’s board of governors, as was Gates’
father. Gates did not make a very good impression on Gloyd. He lacked the
social graces a young lady would have expected of a Harvard man. It was clear
to Gloyd that Gates had had little experience with women. The first thing he
wanted to know when they met was the score she made on her college SAT…..Gates
explain to Gloyd that he had taken his Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) twice so
he could make a perfect score of 1600. (Math and verbal scores each count a
maximum of 800 points.) gates told her that when he first took the test, he
breezed through the math portion but made a silly mistake and ended up with 790
points. The second time he took the test he got a perfect math score of 800.”
The curious thing that I read though is that Bill Gates
highest SAT score is 1590. I suppose that means that he didn’t get the perfect
score on his second try as well, because while he got the perfect score on the
math section, he must have then made an error on the verbal section and score
10 points less on it. Bill Gates certainly comes off as being a goof on a date
in this account. Not sure whether he is genuinely oblivious to his social miscue,
but I suspect that Bill Gates has no qualms about using the SAT to measure the
intelligence and the suitability of his date.
3. Pg 65 – “Gates did make one small but noteworthy
contribution in the field of mathematics while at Harvard. He helped advance
the solution to a mathematical puzzle that had been around for some time. No
one had come up with a definitive solution.” This puzzle is known as the pancake sorting
It is impressive how Gates achieve stuff outside the
domain of the faculty which he was enrolled in, which was the faculty of law.
Yet, there isn’t much information in the book or on the internet about how well
he did when he was in law school. With all the time that is being spent on the
computer, I wonder how he found time to study for law school. I am also curious
as to whether Bill Gates did as well in law. I haven’t found any information of
his performance at law school. But if he was doing well in law school, I wonder
whether he would have reconsidered not dropping of Harvard to finish his degree
first instead.
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