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Pioneers Of Computer Programming

Pioneers of Computer Programming

When you think of 21st century computing, two things come to mind: Windows and video games. Learning Team A introduces you to the two men responsible for these phenomena – Bill Gates and Nolan Bushnell.

William Henry Gates III
During that late 1960's and early 1970's, BASIC was one of the premier programming languages. At that time, Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen made the commitment to learn BASIC by reading the user manuals. In exchange for computer time, they made an agreement with a local company called the Computer Center Corporation to provide de-bugging services for software on the company's DEC machine. This time was used not only to search for errors, but also to study the operating systems from any discarded code they came across. Moreover, during this time Gates continued to expand his knowledge of computer programming as he taught himself other programming languages including FORTRAN, LISP and PDP-10 machine language. (Reitz, 1996)

After the C.C.C. went out of business, Gates and his friends were forced to find a new company located in Portland that used the same PDP-10 machine. Gates negotiated with the managers of the company to let him and his friends write a COBOL payroll program in exchange for free computer time (Reitz, 2006). Through this project, Gates and friends learned much about payroll systems, taxes, and labor reports - invaluable information that they would later rely on when starting Microsoft.

In 1973, Gates decided to enroll at Harvard University to study mathematics or law. During his time at Harvard, Allen and Gates found a copy of Popular Electronics magazine, which had on the cover a picture of the Altair, a computer kit which you could assemble yourself. During their time in high school, Gates, Allen and their friend Paul Gilbert had actually built their own Altair using an Intel 8008 1k microprocessor. After seeing the...