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

two other students, Sam Znaimer and Jim Jenkins. They had been assigned the same room by chance. They didn’t know each other. The three came from vastly different backgrounds and cultures—just the kind of environment Gates’ parents were hoping for. Gates was a rich white kid from Seattle. Znaimer was a poor Jewish kid from Canada whose parents had immigrated to Montreal after the Holocaust. He was attending Harvard on a scholarship, majoring in chemistry. Jenkins was a middle-class black kid from Chattanooga, Tennessee, whose father was in the service.
    “I found Bill fascinating,” recalled Znaimer, who today is a venture capitalist in Vancouver, British Columbia. “I had not run into too many people from fairly affluent, WASP backgrounds. I didn’t know those kinds of people in Montreal. Bill was someone who came from a comfortable family and had gone to a private school. He would talk about how some governor of the state of Washington used to hang out with his grandfather . . . which was not the world I was used to. On the other hand, Bill was very down-to-earth. There was not a lot of bullshit or pompousness about him. We all lived more or less the same lifestyle. We all ate together, worked together, and as a group we were all interested in science, engineering and that kind of stuff. We also all loved science fiction.”
    When he enrolled at Harvard, Gates received permission to take both graduate and undergraduate courses. That was not unusual for gifted students. What was unusual was that he was allowed to set aside those graduate-level courses in math, physics, and computer science and apply the credits toward a graduate degree later. “About two-thirds of my courses were toward my undergraduate degree and about a third were set aside for my graduate degree, although it all doesn’t matter now since I didn’t complete either one,” said Gates.
    That first year he took one of Harvard’s most difficult math courses, called “Math 55.” Almost everyone in the class had scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Gates did well in the course, but he was not the best. Two other students finished ahead of him, including Andy Braiterman, who lived in the same dorm as Gates. Braiterman had entered Harvard as a sophomore. He and Gates became good friends and later roomed together.
    Gates took the typical undergraduate courses in economics, history, literature, and psychology. His attitude toward class work was much the same as it had been at Lakeside. He worked hard and did well in those courses he cared about. He didn’t work hard in courses that didn’t interest him. However, he still did well because he was so smart. In Greek literature his freshman year, Gates fell asleep during the final exam but still managed to receive a “B” in the class. “He was really very proud of that,” recalled Braiterman. “It was a story he liked to tell on himself.”
    That Gates would fall asleep in class was not surprising. He was living on the edge. It was not unusual for him to go as long as three days without sleep. “How he coped with lack of sleep I never figured out,” said Znaimer. “I would kind of wimp out after 18 to 24 hours, but his habit was to do 36 hours or more at a stretch, collapse for ten hours, then go out, get a pizza, and go back at it. And if that meant he was starting again at three o’clock in the morning, so be it.”
    His sleeping habits were just as bizarre. Gates never slept on sheets. He would collapse on his unmade bed, pull an electric blanket over his head and fall asleep instantly and soundly, regardless of the hour or activity in his room. (Gates still falls asleep instantaneously. When he flies, he often puts a blanket over his head and sleeps for the entire flight.)
    “He didn’t seem to pay much attention to things he didn’t care about, whether it was clothes or sleep,” said Znaimer.
    To his roommates and the small group of students he