Free Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by Erickson wallace Page A

school. In the spring of 1973, having already been accepted at Harvard for the fall, Gates returned to Seattle for his final trimester at Lakeside. Although he had missed three months of school work, he quickly caught up. In a calculus class, he made his only appearance to take the final exam, which he aced. He received a “B” in the course, however, because the teacher felt that by never showing up, Gates had not displayed the “right attitude.”
    Gates’ self-confidence was at an all-time high. Bill Hucks, also in the class of ’73 at Lakeside, remembers a squash match with Gates in the school gym shortly before they graduated in June. After the match, which Gates won, Hucks asked him, “So what’s your story? Where do you go from here?”
    Gates said he was heading off to Harvard in the fall. Then he added, in a very matter-of-fact way: “I’m going to make my first million by the time I’m 25.” It was not said as a boast, or even a prediction. He talked about the future as if his success was predestined, a given, as certain as the mathematical proof that one plus one equals two.
    “I remember it not surprising me,” said Hucks, who later went into journalism and now sells medical equipment in the Seattle area. “It was no big deal that this Gates guy was ambitious and was going to make money. Everyone at school knew his background.”
    Following graduation, Gates returned to Vancouver to continue working with Allen on the TRW project. But his summer wasn’t completely a binary existence of zeros and ones, of late- night pizza and Coke in front of a computer terminal. He used part of his salary to buy a speed boat, and he and his friends water-skied on nearby lakes in Oregon and Washington when time allowed on weekends.
    As the summer wore on and it was nearly time for Gates to leave Vancouver to attend college, he and Allen began to talk seriously about forming their own software company. For some time now they had shared the same vision, that one day the computer would be as commonplace in the home as a television set, and that these computers would need software—their software.
    “We always had big dreams,” Allen said.
    CHAPTER 2
    “It’s Going to Happen”
    B ill Gates would later tell a friend he went to Harvard University to learn from people smarter than he was . . . and left disappointed.
    He had arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1973 with no real sense of what he wanted to do with his life. Although he listed his academic major as prelaw, he had little interest in becoming a lawyer like his father. Nor did his parents have any expectations that he would. There was no pressure on him to be this or that. They only insisted he go to college and mix with other students. And what better environment for their son than Harvard, America’s oldest institution of higher learning? There was a mystique about the place. It conjured up images of success, power, influence . . . greatness. Supreme Court justices went to Harvard. So did presidents. Now their son had ascended into this rarefied intellectual atmosphere. Any plans he had to form a software company with Paul Allen would have to wait, his parents insisted.
    “I was always vague about what I was going to do, but my parents wanted me to go to undergraduate school,” Gates said.
    “They didn’t want me to go start a company or just go do graduate work. They didn’t have a specific plan in mind, but they thought I should live with other undergraduates, take normal undergraduate courses . . . which is exactly what I did.”
    At Harvard, most first-year students live in dormitories in and near what is known as the Yard, next to Harvard Square in Cambridge. The Yard is the center of what was the original college, founded in 1636, just 16 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. At the end of their first year, students can apply to live in twelve residential houses.
    Gates was assigned to one of the dorms his freshman year and roomed with