Bill Gates Breaks Down 6 Moments From His Life | WIRED

Hi, I'm Bill Gates, and these are moments from my life. Who's the co-founder of Microsoft, and I are at Lakeside High School, and that's a teletype terminal that connects over a phone line to a GE timeshare computer where you can write basic programs. I was 13 when that teletype showed up, and I had done super well in a math exam, you know, best in the state. So Paul, who was two years ahead of me, when the computer was kind of complicated, he kind of challenged me to say, hey, you know math, can you figure this out? And so he and I became good friends despite that age difference. And, you know, Paul had read a lot of science fiction and knew a lot of things I didn't. So our friendship and partnership started up from that time forward. And in this computer room, the teachers would come in and tried to figure it out, but they ended up wasting a lot of money. And so we kind of took over the computer room and taught the other kids how to program. We were writing huge, complex programs in basic, trying to solve hard problems. A lot of kids were interested at first, but there were a small group that stayed just in day and night using the thing. It's still there. My daughter, who goes to that school, calls it the shrine. So this is kind of an array of different computers. There were a lot of personal computers way before the IBM PC that comes out in 1981. Microsoft had its software on all of them, the Apple II, the Commodore pad, the RadioShack TRS-80, about a dozen machines that were done in Japan. You know, we worked on a ton of machines. We were spreading the idea that these microprocessor-based machines would be revolutionary. The one right here was the first portable computer. That's an eight-line LCD with 32 characters across. That's called the Model 100. That's the last piece of software that I was the primary engineer. And then I sort of more managed people. Well, I still coded, but this is the project where I'm totally in charge and actually figuring out how to fit into a 32k byte ROM, a floating point basic, and a text editor, and a director manager. So that was a super fun very difficult project. So I wrote code. Even to this day, I do some architecture things on the various products. But yeah, I miss the elegance of writing super tight code. Almost nobody does that now because memory is so big, people can be a bit more sloppy than you could be back then. The microprocessor had been coming along. And Paul, in 1971, showed me the 4004, which is the first Intel product. And we talked about Moore's Law. I'd written BASIC for a lot of minicomputers that were still quite expensive. And when he showed me the 8008, I said, no, it's not good enough. But the 8080, that's 1973, that was good enough for me to do a BASIC interpreter. So, you know, that became our first product. And that was, you know, that was the revolution. That was the thing that ushered in personal computing. The creation of Microsoft and being part of the personal computer industry. And, you know, then the internet and all the great things that come out of that. And I feel super, super lucky to have had a central involvement along with thousands of others in those days. Well, Windows 95 was a big milestone for the company. This series of events was immensely fun for everybody who's involved. Because we had been working day and night. These were pretty maniacal days in terms of work was everything. Even, you know, I didn't believe in weekends or vacations. The team pretty broadly had worked super, super hard. The marketing people had figured out how to take this phenomena and, you know, create a lot of excitement around it. You know, we all over the world, we had things being lit up in the Windows colors. We had big events all over the world. There'd been a lot of anticipation because the beta test was literally hundreds of thousands of copies of this thing. And all the developers who had written applications for it were waiting because the memory capacity you got in this generation of machines was so much better than what came before. This was the ushering in of the graphics interface. Moving from character mode, which all the DOS work before this had been, to this graphics mode. And Windows 95 on the PC and then the Mac OS on the Mac were bringing graphics interface into the mainstream. It had been sort of invented at Xerox PARC with some very expensive low volume type machines. But Windows 95, you know, we brought Office across and this product was phenomenally successful. Caught on in a big way. Windows itself, I had bet the company on all the way back in 1983. And so there's 12 years of getting the Windows concept to be faster and the processors are getting better. And here clearly had arrived. And there was no doubt that versus anything else out there, this was the mainstream of computing and all the developers were there to take full advantage of it. Yeah, so this is Melinda who I was not yet married to at the time, although we were engaged. We're out on the Serengeti for our first trip to Africa and we're kind of looking around. We took a bunch of friends with us. It was the first long vacation I'd ever taken. It was a two-week vacation, which seemed quite extreme to me. But it was, you know, great fun and very eye-opening. It's important because it's, you know, the start of our marriage, but also some of the insights that led to the foundation being focused on health of the poorest, particularly in Africa, came from the curiosity about the people and, you know, we're living in very tough conditions. And so subsequent to this, she and I did a lot of reading with this idea that, okay, someday the Microsoft wealth was going to go back to the public and how, you know, the lens towards innovation and really helping those most in need. How could we do that? Well, you know, in Microsoft, my early partner was Paul Allen and then Steve Ballmer was my partner. Now Melinda's, you know, even a totally equal partner in all the foundation work we're doing. So she and I run it together. It was so fascinating. I mean, the relationships we're building, learning all this new stuff, to have somebody to brainstorm with about it, you know, made it a lot more fun. You know, things like writing letters together, giving speeches together, we had to learn how to bring out the best of the both of us in doing those things. But yeah, it was always clear we wanted to do it together. Yeah, we're backstage at the Microsoft CEO Conference and Warren's telling me a story about a business that he had invested in. You know, it was a guy calling him on the phone, you know, trying to tell him he had an investment that Warren should make. And Warren was explaining why it was pretty clearly not something that he was gonna waste money on. He's been such a great friend and, you know, so clever and I've learned so much from him. You know, he's got an amazing sense of humor. Well, I was very lucky that we were introduced and it was 1991 where I was quite reluctant to take any time away from work. Within a few minutes of meeting him, he was asking questions about why could Microsoft compete with IBM and what were the dynamics in our business that were really amazingly good questions that nobody really had asked before. And then I could ask him about his broader view of business. And so we, you know, we became great friends right from that first meeting. Well, a hobby of mine, so I was playing tennis and so it was a, you know, real privilege to do a fundraising event where I was a doubles partner with Roger Federer. Well, you know he's gonna take care of it. You practice saying yours as loud as you can. And actually when an amateur's playing in something like this moving up to the net is particularly valuable because you can hit quite attractive shots up at the net. So a blast for everybody involved. These are a few moments from my life. Thanks for watching.