Before Microsoft: Bill Gates started his first company at age 17
William Henry Gates III, whom we all know as Bill Gates, founded Microsoft with Paul Allen at the age of 19, in April 1975. In just eight months they will have earned $ 16,000. And by the end of 1978, at age 23, Microsoft will have made more than a million dollars. It is always striking that someone at such a young age achieves such victories, especially if we know that Microsoft and Bill Gates himself will be so important in computing and technology for decades. But every success story has a beginning, and in Gates' case, his first venture was not Microsoft.
As a general rule, someone by the name of William Henry Gates III has to be of good birth. There are exceptions, of course, but usually someone with that name is born into a reputable family. The founder of Microsoft was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955. His father was a renowned lawyer and has lived much of his life as a philanthropist. His mother was a businesswoman, becoming the first woman on the board of directors of First Interstate Bank of Washington. And if we go back to his grandparents, his maternal grandfather had been president of the National City Bank of Seattle.
It's no wonder, then, that someone born into a renowned family in Washington State ends up doing great things. For better or worse. Interestingly, his family wanted him to study law. But the second of three brothers, with an older sister and a younger sister, had other ideas in mind. And it is that at the age of 13, Bill Gates wrote the first computer program of him.
It goes without saying that at the age of 19 he founded Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen and what happened next. Back then he was a sophomore at Harvard University. But between the ages of 13 and 19, Bill Gates took his first steps in programming, founded his own group of programmers and even created his first company, two years before starting Microsoft.
Young William likes to code
From the age of 13, Bill Gates studied at Lakeside Private School in Seattle, his hometown. There young William discovered his passion for computing. When Lakeside acquired a General Electric computer and Teletype Model 33 ASR terminals, Gates became interested in the hulk and the possibilities it contained. It was with that machine that he programmed his first software, an online three-game type game in which you could play alone against the computer.
Back then, Bill Gates' crew included Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder), Ric Weiland (second Microsoft employee) and Kent Evans, who died in a rock climbing accident on his stage at Lakeside. The four of them founded what was called the Lakeside Programmers Club, their own group of programmers. The idea came from Allen, who became interested in Gates because of his good math grades. Or so legend has it.
The four's passion for computing reached such a point that for a summer they were unable to use the PDP-10 minicomputers provided by the Computer Center Corporation, founded in 1968. The price of computers at the time was so high that many users preferred pay to use them for a specified time. This also benefited the owner of the computers, since he obtained revenue from his devices while he was not using them. As well. The reason for the CCC ban was because the four members of the Lakeside Programmers Club were caught looking for vulnerabilities in the operating system of computers so that they could use them for longer for free.
But the anecdote ended well. Or not. After that temporary punishment, Gates' group offered that company to find bugs and vulnerabilities in its software in exchange for using its computers. Thanks to that agreement, Bill Gates was able to immerse himself in programming languages of that time such as Fortran, Lisp or machine language. As in similar Hollywood stories, everything would have pointed to Gates and his friends having joined the Computer Center Corporation after finishing their studies. However, the company closed in 1970 after two years of life.
Knowing the talents of young Bill to program, in 1971 a professor at Lakeside, the institute where Gates studied, asked him if he could automate the class organization system. Gates carried out the task in collaboration with his great friend Kent Evans. In return, they would get time to use the institute's computers and the benefits derived from their copyright. The task was challenging, as Lakeside had merged with a local girls' high school and, in all, they numbered about 400 students.
An untimely accident would end the friendship of Gates and Evans. Surely they would have continued together in business projects like Microsoft or the one that preceded it. However, Evans made the poor decision to enroll in a climbing course and passed away after a fall in one of his practices.
William's first company
Although Bill Gates' first job adventure was his task as a bug finder in the Computer Center Corporation software, his first company came in 1972, three years before the official founding of Microsoft, the company for which he is known worldwide. .
After the death of Kent Evans, his great friend from his youth, Gates decides to create a business with his, also his friend Paul Allen, a member of the Lakeside Programmers Club. This tandem will be joined by a third, Paul Gilbert. The three created in 1972 Traf-O-Data, a company based in Seattle. At the time, Gates was 17 and Allen was 19.
The purpose of the company was ambitious: to read raw data from road traffic counters and create reports for traffic engineers. For this they would use computers with Intel 8008 processors and CP / M as the operating system.
The counting method was curious. Pneumatic meters were placed on the roads, rubber hoses that created a blow of air when passing over the wheels of the vehicles. Those air blows were recorded on a roll of paper tape. Or so it was done in the 70s. The time and the number of counted axes pierced the paper in 16-bit patterns. Then these data were translated by specialized companies. Thus, traffic engineers could know where an improvement was needed on the road.
Neither short nor lazy, the three Traf-O-Data employees, then Lakeside students, considered starting a machine that would read punched paper tapes automatically. For the project, they took advantage of the free time of access to computers obtained by writing programs and recruited classmates to manually transcribe the data obtained by the perforated traffic paper. They even used a University of Washington computer thanks to Paul Allen's father.
The result was a machine that used an Intel 8008 microprocessor and a tape reader. But to put the device together, they had to turn to Paul Gilbert, whom they met through various contacts. The reason is that neither Gates nor Allen knew about hardware. Theirs was the code. The complexity of the project was such that Allen had to emulate the 8008 processor on an IBM System / 360 at the University of Washington, where Allen was just starting out as a student, to test the software that would be installed on his own machine.
Little information is available regarding the success or failure of Traf-O-Data. It is true that the company did not last long. Founded in 1972, it closed in 1975. In part, because the State of Washington, where they lived, decided to do the traffic tasks that were previously contracted through private companies for free. This made the existence of Traf-O-Data meaningless. There was no business possible.
In the words of Paul Allen, although it was not a resounding success, he did prepare them to later launch what we will know as Microsoft. Allen also adds that with this first business project they learned to emulate microprocessors and create software for machines that had not yet been created. On his part, Bill Gates sums up the journey of Traf-O-Data with the phrase “we made a little money and we had fun”.
Two curiosities to close this article. The first is that today there is also a company called Traf-O-Data. On its website we can see that it was founded in 1999 and that it is based in Tampa, Florida, a long way from Seattle, Washington, from the original Traf-O-Data.
The second curiosity has to do with a photograph of Bill Gates quite famous. And it is that on December 13, 1977, a young 22-year-old Gates was arrested in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for driving without a license. As I said at the beginning of this article, in 1978 Microsoft made more than 1.3 million dollars. Hence, Gates bought a Porsche 911 with which, apparently, he liked to speed through the desert. Not surprisingly, he was reportedly fined several times for speeding on his trips to Seattle.
