David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Both things can be true. He was the number one math student in the State of Washington. He was a nerdy kid, a brilliant kid, and also fiercely competitive. His childhood friend and co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, would say about him, “You could tell three things about Bill Gates pretty quickly. He was really smart, he was really competitive, and he wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent.” That sounds about right. Famously, speaking of Paul and where Bill and Paul meet, when Bill is in seventh grade, his parents enroll him at the Lakeside School, which now I think is internationally famous because of Bill. It is a super rigorous college prep school, middle school, and high school. Bill ends up writing the scheduling software for class scheduling that he puts himself in the classes with all the girls. Funny. This Bill, 13 years old, seventh grade, Lakeside, this is when it starts. Obviously, Microsoft doesn't start. But during that year, Bill is 13 years old, the Lakeside Mothers Club raises money to buy the school a teletype, connect it up, and rent computer time from a DEC PDP 10 that is located in downtown Seattle and owned by the branch office there of General Electric. Probably a bunch of you are like, I have no idea what any of those words mean, so we got to set some context. This is 1968, the Beatles, Vietnam, the Summer of Love. This is not the computer age. 2001, A Space Odyssey had just come out.…

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