Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Specifically, why are they not going to care about it? I don't know exactly what an IBM mainframe system, System 360, 370, whatever cost. I'm imagining tens of millions of dollars all in total cost, maybe hundreds of millions of total dollars to run a system like that and buy it. The first DEC machine, when it comes out, the PDP-1, a few years before this time, was priced at $120,000, so an order of magnitude, maybe two below a system that you would buy from IBM. Obviously still a long, long, long way from the personal computer. People are not buying these things for their houses, but GE will buy one for the field office in Seattle, or universities will buy them for research, for their students, for their professors. DEC creates a new market for computing. Bill, he's so studied in business history, the founder, Ken Olson is Bill's hero. He totally looks up to DEC and what DEC's done. The DEC and minicomputer UI is still the same as the mainframe. You're still using a teletype. There's no innovation in terms of what computing is or how you use it. It's just cheaper and more people have access to it. Back to Lakeside and the Mother's Club raising money for this access here for the school, Bill, remember, he's just started. He's in seventh grade, and Lakeside is a middle school in a high school. The high school is actually in a separate building. The computer room that gets installed with the teletypes was over in the high school, but Bill doesn't care. He gets exposed to it in a math class one day and he's like, oh, I'm hooked. He goes over. He's hanging out with the high schoolers, teaches himself how to program, and pretty quickly he becomes known as one of the very best programmers there. He and three other kids form what they call themselves the Lakeside Programmers Group. One of his buddies who he forms it with is of course the high schooler or I think the 10th grader at the time, Paul Allen. There is a fantastic photo, listeners, that we will tweet of Bill and Paul sitting in the computer room at Lakeside. Bill, I think he's 13–14. He looks like he's about eight. I think on the wall, there's this almost printed out magazine thing that says the bug slayer that they've hung up over the wall. It's amazing. These high school kids, they start the Lakeside Programmers Group. They call it the programmers group because they are programmers. This is another super important thing to learn. To use a computer at this time meant to be a programmer. There was no package software that you bought. The software that IBM was selling was the operating system to make the machines actually function, and it was the programming languages that you could then program on but you weren't clicking around and using Excel or pulling up apps. Everybody who used a computer wrote their own software.…

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