Microsoft 3

Early in his elementary school days, Bill Gates quickly shot to the head of the class, consistently outscoring his peers in most subjects, but especially math and science. His parents soon enrolled him in Lakeside Prep School, where the atmosphere was intellectual enough to stimulate the young Gates. This move to Lakeside would prove historic, for it was here, in the spring of 1968, that he was introduced to computers.

At that time, computers were still too large and expensive for the school to purchase one of its own. Over the next ten months or so, the school struck agreements with various corporations who allowed the students to use their computers. Bill Gates, his buddy Paul Allen and a handful of others quickly took to computing. In fact, they began to skip classes, opting instead to stay in the computer room and write programs, read computer books and find out exactly how these machines worked. They soon learned to hack the system, and altered and crashed valuable files until they were banned from the computer. Soon, however, Bill and his friends were actually hired by thecomputer company to find bugs and explore weaknesses in the system, which kept causing the computers to crash. Instead of paying the boys for their time, they were granted something even better--unlimited computer time. Gates has been quoted as saying that that was the time when he got into computers fulltime. "I mean, then I became hardcore. It was day and night," he said. The boys used their time eating, drinking and breathing computers. They studied manuals, explored the system, and hounded the employees with questions until they had formed a base of knowledge that would eventually lead to the formation of Microsoft.
The computer company that was hiring went out of business in 1970, and the boys had to find alternate sources for computer time. They were soon hired by Information Sciences Inc. to write a program for payroll. This time they actually earned money as well as enjoying the unlimited computer time. It was during this time that the group gained notoriety for their skill in computer programming. They were hired or contracted by various organizations to find bugs and fix them.