Bill and Me

I once spent a weekend with Bill Gates and some of his cronies, including Paul Allen, before either of them became rich and famous. It was just a matter of chance, and it didn’t seem all that big of a deal at the time.

Back in 1978, Microsoft was a tiny company of less than 20 people located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Here’s a picture and an article about them. Not a likely-looking bunch, but most of them ended up well-off, and a couple of them (you know which ones) are fabulously wealthy now.

At the time, I was working for National Semiconductor, in their microprocessor group. National had just produced their clone of the Intel 8080, the chip found in most “home computers” of the day. They were building a new development system for the 8080, and hired Microsoft to port their language tools to this new system. I was sent to Albuquerque to help Microsoft with the porting effort. I was there for about three or four days, and most of that time is a blur now, with only little episodes that stand out in my memory.

Bill picked me up at the airport in his gold AMC Pacer, an oddly styled bubble car that was the laughingstock of the auto industry. I later learned that Bill’s Porsche 911 was in the shop getting a rebuilt engine installed, forcing him to press his less flashy backup car into taxi service.

I then spent several very long days working in the Microsoft office, slaving over the keyboards of Intel development systems. I vaguely recall that the office was high in a cube-shaped office building, and that there were no windows. There was a PDP-10 in an old-style computer room with raised floors and powerful cooling system; this was Microsoft’s main development system. In another room was a collection of microprocessor systems; this was where I worked.

My helper in most of this was a fellow named Marc McDonald (see his picture in the link above). He was Microsoft employee #1. He’d written most of the code in their language tools (assembler, linker, Fortran compiler), so he was the natural choice for helping port them to a new sytem. What I remember about the code was that it was all written in assembly language with very few comments. In other words, it was nearly impossible to understand. I was impressed by the quantity, but not the quality of the code.

I don’t recall interacting with Bill much in the office. He was in and out, occasionally offering suggestions, but not really involved with the development process. By then, his role had already become one of selling his products, whether they existed yet or not.

Microsoft geeks worked incredibly long hours. They didn’t seem to have social lives, which was convenient, but their work ethic wore me out. They did, however, enjoy driving tractors for fun. Late one night, Bill packed me and a couple of his co-workers into his Porsche, and drove us out to a construction site north of town. There were several gigantic tractors there, which Bill had hoped we could drive around. But unfortunately, none of the tractors would start up on this occasion, so we drove back home unsatisfied. I was secretly relieved, though; the last thing I wanted was to be arrested for partaking in a teenage-style prank on a business trip.

Even in 1978, after only two years of being in business, and well before their DOS empire became invincible, Bill and Paul Allen seemed to have somehow stumbled onto some money. I recall visiting Paul’s house with some other Microsoft folks for a late-night party that might have been a house-warming. The place was brand new, and nearly completely empty of furniture except for a projection TV. The priorities were clear.

I did get some time off one afternoon. One of the Microsoft guys (who I think might have been Paul, but I’m not sure now) drove me out to Sandia Peak for a ride on the world’s longest tramway. I have acrophobia and was terrified the whole way up the mountain. It was very pleasant to get back on solid ground at the peak, and even more pleasant to find that the north side of the peak was gently sloping alpine forest, a huge contrast to the stark, sun-baked south side. The existence of this forest was one good thing I could see about living in Albuquerque.

I don’t remember much else about the trip. Afterwards, I briefly thought that working for Microsoft could be fun, since they seemed to have a certain confidence, drive and passion that was attractive. But their love of work seemed excessive to me, and their location did not attract me. So I never sent them my resumé, and thus passed up my best chance at becoming rich and famous.

In later years, I worked for two companies, Digital Research and Borland, that were destroyed in part by ruthless and sometimes unethical competition from Microsoft. The signs of this ruthlessness were not quite in evidence in 1978, but would be quite obvious in a couple of short years.