Hard Drive - Bill Gates and the making of the Microsoft Empire 3

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.