A 1970 photo of Bill Gates reveals something significant about him. At sixteen, he is seated beside his friend Paul Allen at a Teletype terminal at Lakeside School in Seattle. They are both gazing at the machine with a level of concentration that is not performative. That terminal was purchased by the Mothers’ Club with money from a rummage sale. Perhaps no rummage sale in history has had more repercussions later on.
Gates was raised in a cozy and competitive home in Seattle. The family played board games and cards with real stakes, and losing had repercussions. His parents desired for him to pursue a career in law. One was his father. The strategy seemed plausible enough. The plan was rendered obsolete when Gates discovered computers.
Gates was the type of student who made teachers at Lakeside, a private school with a hilltop campus in north Seattle, feel both proud and a little uneasy. Strong in all subjects, he excelled in science and math, and he had a tendency to delve so deeply into a problem that he emerged with something no one else had discovered. His near-perfect SAT score of 1590 out of 1600 would have drawn attention from any admissions office. He received a National Merit Scholarship. He had already co-written a class scheduling program for the school by the time he graduated in 1973, an early business endeavor that brought him computer time and a meager royalty. Additionally, he had written his first computer program—a tic tac toe game—on that Mothers’ Club terminal when he was thirteen. He was already considering the machine’s capabilities rather than just its operation.
Nobody was surprised when Harvard accepted him that autumn. Because old plans die slowly, he enrolled as a pre-law student. However, he quickly switched to graduate-level computer science and mathematics courses, including the renowned Math 55, which is so difficult that many students drop it in the first few weeks. Gates did not leave. Additionally, he came up with an algorithm for sorting pancakes that a Harvard professor had presented as an open problem. For more than thirty years, his solution was the fastest known version. It is still noticeably faster than its sole replacement.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that Gates had little interest in the credential even as a student. The issue piqued his interest. Though it was a means rather than an end, Harvard was a place with interesting problems and intelligent people to debate with, including a fellow student named Steve Ballmer, who would go on to lead Microsoft. Gates and Allen saw something more pressing than any semester when the Altair 8800 debuted on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975. They got in touch with the manufacturer, claimed to have a functional BASIC interpreter (they didn’t yet, but they quickly built one), and within months, they struck a deal. Gates left Harvard for a leave of absence. He never returned.
According to reports, his parents were encouraging, which speaks volumes about how they perceived their son. According to Gates, the choice was reversible because he could always go back if it didn’t work out. This framing reveals something about his approach to nearly everything: a structured confidence that appears bold on the outside but feels calculated on the inside.
Thirty-two years after his departure, in 2007, Harvard granted him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Joking that it had taken him a long time to finish, he delivered the commencement speech. The audience chuckled. Gates had long since moved past his concern for the piece of paper and was already among the most important philanthropists in history. He had been using the curiosity, rigor, and habit of going above and beyond the call of duty that education had given him for decades. The diploma was merely an afterthought.
