Convergence.

William Henry Gates was fifteen in 1970 and, by his own admission, the smartest kid in Seattle, Washington. He attended the progressive Lakeside School, a private high school that had a computer club. There Gates met the principal figures with whom he worked during the 1970s to form what arguably became within twenty years the most successful corporation in the world.

Lakeside Programmers Group.

At Lakeside, Gates, with his friends Paul Allen and Ric Wieland, had timesharing access to a mainframe computer. Using a programming language called BASIC, developed at Dartmouth University in the late 1950s, they could type in a set of instructions and have the machine run routines that displayed results on a teletype terminal. When he was in the eighth grade Gates and his friends wrote programs in BASIC for simple games, such as ticktacktoe, and for more useful computations, such as...