Read Online Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by Erickson wallace - Free Book Online
Authors: Erickson wallace
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Weiland decided they didn t need their younger colleagues and asked Gates and Kent Evans to bow out of the ISI project.
Recalled Gates: “Paul and Rick decided there wasn’t enough work to go around so they told us ‘We don’t need you guys.’ But then they got sidetracked. They weren’t even writing the payroll program. So they asked me to come back in and I said to them, ‘Okay, you want me to come back in, then I’ll be in charge of this thing. ... Kent and I ended up writing most of the payroll program, a COBOL program. We got free computer puter time to do the work, and as compensation we got free computer time. It ended up being a good deal for everybody.
The payroll project was actually “pretty boring,” according to Gates. “You had to understand state taxes, payroll deductions . . . that kind of stuff.”
The business deal with ISI meant the Lakeside Programmers Group would have to become a formal partnership. Gates’ dad helped with the legal formalities and also assisted with the ISI contract. He became the group’s principal legal adviser. Gates and Evans were 15 years old. Evans kept a journal of the ISI project, and it gives a rare insight into kids who, when it came to business, were wise beyond their years. Wrote Evans in one entry: “We’ve been writing a very complicated payroll program. March 16 is our deadline. This is very educational because we’ve learned a lot by working in a business environment and dealing with government agencies. During the past few weeks we’ve been frantically trying to get it done. Tuesday we go to Portland to deliver the program, and as they have put it, ‘Hammer out an agreement on future work.’ Everything so far has been done for its educational benefits and for large amounts of expensive computer time. Now we want to get some monetary benefits, too.”
Gates, Allen, Evans, and Weiland boarded a bus to Portland when the program was done for a meeting with ISI’s executives. After the meeting, Kent wrote, “... we all were given pencil and paper to write resumes to aid them in hiring us . . . money had not been mentioned. Paul, Bill and I didn’t want to be paid hourly rates, so we mentioned piece rates for programmed products or royalty arrangements. The royalty scheme went over big. We get about ten percent of the money ISI gets because of one of our programs—we get more in the long run and the company doesn’t need to tie up any of its capital.”
It’s not clear how much, if anything, the group made in royalties from their payroll project, but ISI gave them about $10,000 worth of free computer time.
, “If anybody wants to know why Bill Gates is where he is today, in my judgment it’s because of this early experience cutting deals,” said Marvin Evans, Kent’s father.
Allen graduated from Lakeside in 1971 and enrolled that fall at Washington State University, majoring in computer science. But he and Gates were already working on another moneymaking project involving their own company, which they called Traf-O-Data.
The idea behind their enterprise was ingenious. Almost every municipality used metal boxes linked to rubber hoses that stretched across the roadway to count cars. These traffic boxes contained a 16-channel paper tape (twice as wide as the 8-channel tape used in old teletype machines), and each time a car passed over the rubber hose, the machine punched the tape with the binary numbers zero and one. The numbers reflected time and volume. Municipalities hired private companies to translate this raw data into information city engineers could then use, for example, to determine how long a traffic light needed to be red or green for the best traffic flow.
But the companies providing these services were slow and expensive. Gates and Allen figured they could program a computer to analyze the traffic-counter tapes, then sell the information to municipalities faster and cheaper than the competition. Gates recruited seventh and
Recalled Gates: “Paul and Rick decided there wasn’t enough work to go around so they told us ‘We don’t need you guys.’ But then they got sidetracked. They weren’t even writing the payroll program. So they asked me to come back in and I said to them, ‘Okay, you want me to come back in, then I’ll be in charge of this thing. ... Kent and I ended up writing most of the payroll program, a COBOL program. We got free computer puter time to do the work, and as compensation we got free computer time. It ended up being a good deal for everybody.
The payroll project was actually “pretty boring,” according to Gates. “You had to understand state taxes, payroll deductions . . . that kind of stuff.”
The business deal with ISI meant the Lakeside Programmers Group would have to become a formal partnership. Gates’ dad helped with the legal formalities and also assisted with the ISI contract. He became the group’s principal legal adviser. Gates and Evans were 15 years old. Evans kept a journal of the ISI project, and it gives a rare insight into kids who, when it came to business, were wise beyond their years. Wrote Evans in one entry: “We’ve been writing a very complicated payroll program. March 16 is our deadline. This is very educational because we’ve learned a lot by working in a business environment and dealing with government agencies. During the past few weeks we’ve been frantically trying to get it done. Tuesday we go to Portland to deliver the program, and as they have put it, ‘Hammer out an agreement on future work.’ Everything so far has been done for its educational benefits and for large amounts of expensive computer time. Now we want to get some monetary benefits, too.”
Gates, Allen, Evans, and Weiland boarded a bus to Portland when the program was done for a meeting with ISI’s executives. After the meeting, Kent wrote, “... we all were given pencil and paper to write resumes to aid them in hiring us . . . money had not been mentioned. Paul, Bill and I didn’t want to be paid hourly rates, so we mentioned piece rates for programmed products or royalty arrangements. The royalty scheme went over big. We get about ten percent of the money ISI gets because of one of our programs—we get more in the long run and the company doesn’t need to tie up any of its capital.”
It’s not clear how much, if anything, the group made in royalties from their payroll project, but ISI gave them about $10,000 worth of free computer time.
, “If anybody wants to know why Bill Gates is where he is today, in my judgment it’s because of this early experience cutting deals,” said Marvin Evans, Kent’s father.
Allen graduated from Lakeside in 1971 and enrolled that fall at Washington State University, majoring in computer science. But he and Gates were already working on another moneymaking project involving their own company, which they called Traf-O-Data.
The idea behind their enterprise was ingenious. Almost every municipality used metal boxes linked to rubber hoses that stretched across the roadway to count cars. These traffic boxes contained a 16-channel paper tape (twice as wide as the 8-channel tape used in old teletype machines), and each time a car passed over the rubber hose, the machine punched the tape with the binary numbers zero and one. The numbers reflected time and volume. Municipalities hired private companies to translate this raw data into information city engineers could then use, for example, to determine how long a traffic light needed to be red or green for the best traffic flow.
But the companies providing these services were slow and expensive. Gates and Allen figured they could program a computer to analyze the traffic-counter tapes, then sell the information to municipalities faster and cheaper than the competition. Gates recruited seventh and
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