Lucky Kid

3 Pages 748 Words

Today Bill Gates is synonymous with money (it’s hard not to be when one is worth, give or take, 60 billion dollars), but it wasn’t always that way. On October 28, 1955 William Henry Gates II was just a regular newborn; his mother counted all his toes and fingers to make sure they were all there and thanked whatever higher powers are up there for this gift from heaven. His life proceeded as normally as one’s can when one is fated to be the richest man in the world. Bill started his schooling in the public school system, but he soon surpassed the best that the government had to offer so his parents, perhaps sensing his great future, enrolled him in a private school by the name of Lakeside. This was to be a momentous decision, for at Lakeside little William was first introduced to computers.
The school, understanding that computers were to be integral parts of the future world, decided to purchase one of the machines, or at least access to one. Being as this was 1968, computers were large and quite expensive so the school purchased time on a computer from GE. For Bill Gates and a handful of other students the allure of the computer was irresistible; they spent all day and night huddled around the computer, and when they were not actually at the computer they were reading books about the machines. A problem arose: the students, who would someday become the founders of the largest computer cooperation in the world, had used up all the computer time their school had money for. The dilemma was soon remedied by an altruistic man who owned a computer company. Ah, but our young hackers were not nearly finished with their mischief, they had much fun exploring the new computer system and were in fact too smart for it. They wiggled their way in and out of files they should never have seen and even altered data. When the computer children were banned from the machine for several weeks they formed the Lakeside Programmers Group, some kids set ...