welcome back today we're going to talk about software and specifically software for the personal computer as we talked about earlier when they built those big old mainframe computers right after World War II the men building them thought that the hardware was the big thing and that software was something they could delegate to the women such as Grace Hopper or the Six Women of En well the same thing happens in the personal computer industry the boys with their toys end up creating things like the AL or the apple one and two and going to The Homebrew Computer Club and they really don't have a lot of respect for software but Bill Gates was one of those kids who didn't grow up making Heath kits and soldering circuits he didn't like Hardware that much he liked to code and he had the Great great Insight that the software would be the industry that would dominate the computer Revolution when he was uh 12 years old in the fall of 1967 Gates growing up in Seattle was sent to the Lakeside School sort of a very fancy private school near Seattle and right when he arrived the Parents Club was was able to raise some money so that a computer terminal could be put in the basement of the science building and that computer terminal was really just a dumb terminal that connected through a time share Arrangement by telephone to a big computer somewhere else but it was a computer that had the Language basic which was a new language for computers that had been written at Dartmouth University that allowed ordinary smart Geeks to program for computers Bill Gates loved it he once told me the reason he liked computers and particularly software was quote when you use a computer you can't make fuzzy statements you make only precise statements so there he is on the right looking incredibly young 12 years old but he could pass for 9 years old with a couple of friends Paul Allen on the left the most important of the friends in the room in the basement with the terminal in Lakeside High School uh for that computer and the teachers couldn't really understand how to use basic how to use a computer after one or two days a group of three or four of these young Geeks were able to understand it better than any of the teachers so with Paul Allen who not only looked older but could even grow sideburns Bill Gates and two other friends form the Lakeside programming group in the fall of 1968 and their first job involves a computer the deck computer pdp10 that a company in Seattle had bought but they didn't have to pay for it as long as there were still bugs in it and they hired kids to use it every night and ride it as hard as they possibly can in order to continue to find bugs and cause it to crash and so for months uh Bill Gates Paul Allen and their friends got use of the pdp10 remember that's the one uh that space war was uh written for the one with the graphical user interface in order to figure out the program and how to uh test it out they realized they needed the source code but they weren't allowed to have it and so one night Paul Allen and Bill Gates went to a dumpster where they knew near the building that the engineers who had access to the source code were using it and writing in things and uh Paul Allen lifted up Bill Gates and tossed them into the dumpster so he could rumage around the garbage and coffee grinds and find some of the papers that would have the program as Paul said he couldn't have weighed more than 110 pounds and then they found it these fanfold printouts and they took it back to the terminal room and poured over it for hours Paul Allen said it was like a Rosetta Stone it helped them understand how to do the programming the other job they got was from their school when their School mer merged with a nearby girl school class scheduling became a problem and so uh The Faculty the administration of the Lakeside School hires the kids in the programming group and especially Bill Gates taking the lead to do the class schedule he gets into Harvard goes there and most of his time he's playing pong which is just become the popular game thanks to uh Atari uh and also playing space War because in the computer Lab at Harvard there was this wonderful machine his favorite machine the deck pdp10 which you could play Space war on the computer lab by the way was named after Howard aen it still had Howard Akin's mark one computer that he and Grace Hopper had done right after World War Two uh Gates was a not a great student because he never went to the class classes he was enrolled in it was a matter of principle to him that he was going to be able to do well in the class without ever attending the lectures in fact he only went to lectures for classes he was not enrolled in and at one point in his sophomore year he enrolls in classes and then uh finds he was auditing classes at the exact same time as the classes he was enrolled in so he wouldn't make a mistake and actually go to a class he was enrolled in and he also convinces Paul Allen to move to Boston and work for Honeywell Bill had been offered a job at Honeywell didn't want to drop out of college yet convinced Paul to come take it so one day in December of 1974 right when the January 75 issue of Popular Mechanics that magazine we've seen a few times during these lectures uh came out Paul Allen is going through Harvard Square that has this wonderful out of town news kiosk and there he sees the popular Electronics with the alt on the cover he sort of half jogs down to the Radcliff yard which is where Bill lived through slushy snow to to show him this uh and say hey we got to get on it we got to get moving to program for the AL because the new Intel 880 chip is uh going to be powerful and we have to get in on doing the programming Bill said when Paul showed me that magazine there was no such thing as a software industry we had the Insight that you could create one and we did that was the most important idea I ever had that was in an interview Bill Gates gave me for the innovators the book that's for this course before he died Paul Allen threatened to sue me it was such a rivalry as well as a friendship between him and Bill Gates because that sentence gave Bill Gates too much credit for having that Insight of course he never could really sue me but I did agree to tweak it in the footnotes to say both of them had that insight and what they decided to do is create a version of basic that program that they used on their computer back at Lakeside High School to create a version of basic for the alt means it has to be squeezed into very very little memory and Bill writes this program uh and squeezes it into the memory and they decide to call mits Ed Roberts that guy in Albuquerque and say we're creating this uh we were making this uh basic for the alt and basically Ed Robert says the first person to come through the door in Albuquerque with a working basic for the alter will get the contract from me and Gates turned to Allan after they had the telephone call with Ed Roberts and says God we got to get going on this one amusing thing is Bill was the one who wanted to talk to Ed Roberts but he knew that he was so young that if he showed up in Albuquerque uh Ed Roberts would like not uh give him much attention so he said he pretended to be Paul Allen talked in the deep voice said it was Paul Allen because it would be Paul Allen who would end up flying out there with the tape of basic that they had wrote they squeezed it in under 4K of memory made it super fast it was the coolest program I ever wrote Bill said once again Paul Allen later sent me notes on that program showing he had written at least half of it uh Paul Allen flies to Albuquerque he walks in he's at he meets with Ed Roberts at alter and feed in the tape into the Altar and tries it out doing the toggles it says the command for print 2+ 2 not the hardest thing in the world but it would be the first time that the alt would run with a software program and boom four pops up and Robert says oh my God it printed for and so Bill Gates and Paul Allen got the job of writing software for the alt now all the people at the Homebrew Computer Club who had been buying the alt also had paid now for this basic that uh Bill Gates and Paul had written and many of them hadn't gotten it yet because uh mits and alter were having trouble fulfilling things so when they go visit Palo Alto with the AL Ed Roberts and Bill Gates show it off to members of The Homebrew Computer Club and some of them perin a copy of the tape of basic and make many many copies of it and give it away for free to everybody under the theory that Hardware you should pay for but software should be free this causes Bill Gates to write an open letter to The Homebrew computer club hobbyist and you can see it here it says Paul Allen and myself have created uh this basic spent $40,000 doing it people like it and yet everybody is stealing it why is this and he said as you hobbyists must be aware most of you steal your software and who cares about all the people who worked on it and he says that will make sure there will no longer be quality software written for the hobby market and at the end of the letter he said I would appreciate letters from anybody who wants to pay up or suggestion or comment just write me he gives the address in Albuquerque New Mexico where they were still living nothing would be able to please me more he says than to be able to hire programs if you pay up for the copies of the basic that you copied and perined and there he signs it Bill Gates General partner and they've just made up the word micro- soft for microcomputer soft software and of course becomes Microsoft uh one of the members of The Homebrew Computer Club said hey we ended up making Microsoft basic the standard for all hobbyist computers because everybody used it and whatever computer they had and then that really helped Microsoft grow but he called us Thieves for doing so Bill Gates leaves Albuquerque with Paul Allen right after that they move micros off back to their hometown of Seattle Gates gets arrested for speeding as he's leaving the town of Albuquerque and speeding really fast even is booked and put in jail for a few hours this all comes to fruition when Microsoft this new company they've founded decide gets the contract to write a dis operating system basically an operating system system for the new IBM personal computer which was coming onto the market in the mid1 1980s to compete with apple and other small personal computers and what IBM did was it licensed a version of an operating system from Microsoft but made a really bad mistake in order to save money they said Microsoft could also license it to any other computer maker like H Packard or Dell and so Microsoft DOS becomes the standard operating system for the computer industry what IBM didn't realize is that Hardware would sort of become a commodity you don't really care too much whether you were using a Dell laptop or hulet Packer laptop or a IBM or Lenovo or any type of laptop what matters to you is the operating system that you're running dos or Windows or Linux and so it becomes that Hardware just becomes commoditized whereas the software industry invented by Bill Gates tends to rule there was one more problem look at that screen of Microsoft DOS with IBM computers there was one more problem just like the app Apple screen on the Apple 2 which we saw in the previous lecture there it is up top and the operating system screen that Microsoft writes for IBM and other type of PCS it's just not very friendly there's all sorts of command prompts and things you're supposed to remember how to do so there's one more big step that has to happen before the computer Revolution takes off and that big step is creating very intuitive human computer interfaces in other words graphical interfaces that you don't have to learn how to do command line uh prompts you just learn to point and click thanks