Bill Gates didn’t start Microsoft in a vacuum. Most people think he just woke up a genius in a Harvard dorm, but the truth is way more interesting—and it starts at a private school in Seattle called Lakeside. Honestly, if he hadn't gone there, the world might still be using paper ledgers for everything. It’s that simple.
Lakeside was, and still is, an elite institution. But in the late 1960s, it did something radical. While most schools were barely teaching kids how to use a slide rule, the Lakeside Mothers' Club used the proceeds from a rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a GE system. That single decision changed history. It gave a scrawny eighth-grader named Bill Gates access to a world that basically didn't exist for the rest of the planet.
Why Bill Gates High School Experience Was a Statistical Anomaly
It’s hard to overstate how rare this was. We're talking about 1968. Computers were the size of refrigerators and lived in climate-controlled basements at major universities or defense contractors.
Gates wasn't alone in that computer room, though. He was joined by Paul Allen, who was two years older, and Kent Evans, Bill’s best friend who tragically died in a mountain climbing accident before they even graduated. They were obsessed. They weren't just "using" the computer; they were trying to break it. They wanted to know how the software worked, why it crashed, and how to make it faster.
Most kids go to high school to learn algebra or play football. Gates went to Lakeside to exploit system bugs.
The C-Cube Scandal and Free Computing
Here is a detail a lot of the glossy biographies gloss over: Gates and his friends were actually banned from the computer system for a while. They had discovered a way to exploit bugs in the operating system to get free computing time. The company providing the service, Computer Center Corporation (C-Cube), caught them.
But instead of just kicking them out forever, the company made a deal because they were losing money from crashes. They hired the "Lakeside Programmers Group"—which was just a bunch of teenagers—to find bugs in their software. In exchange, the boys got unlimited time on the machines.
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Think about that for a second.
A multi-million dollar tech company in the 60s was so stumped by their own software that they turned to high schoolers for help. Gates spent his nights at the C-Cube offices, studying source code until the sun came up. He would bike home in the morning, sleep for a few hours, and then head back to class. It wasn't a hobby; it was an obsession that bordered on the pathological.
The Paycheck Before the Diploma
By the time he was a senior, Gates was already a professional. Information Sciences, Inc. hired the Lakeside crew to write a payroll program in COBOL. He also famously wrote the school's class scheduling software.
You’ve probably heard the rumor that he rigged the code so he’d be the only boy in classes full of girls.
It’s actually true. He admitted it later.
But beyond the teenage antics, the scheduling project was a massive computational challenge. It required balancing hundreds of variables—teacher availability, room sizes, and student requirements. Solving that as a teenager gave him a level of confidence that most developers don't reach until their thirties.
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The TRW Project at Bonneville Power
In 1972, during his senior year, Gates and Paul Allen got a real-world gig. A company called TRW was struggling with the power grid control system at the Bonneville Power Administration. They needed programmers who understood the PDP-10, a machine Gates knew inside and out because of his time at Lakeside.
He had to convince his teachers to let him leave school for a "special project." Because he was already so far ahead of the curriculum, they said yes. He spent months in Vancouver, Washington, writing code that helped manage the power flow for the entire Pacific Northwest. He was 17.
What Most People Get Wrong About "Self-Made" Success
We love the "garage to riches" story. It feels American. It feels gritty. But the Bill Gates high school era teaches us a different lesson about "outliers," a concept Malcolm Gladwell popularized by referencing Gates specifically.
Success isn't just about IQ. It’s about 10,000 hours of practice.
Gates got those hours because he was in the right place at the right time with the right parents. His father was a prominent lawyer; his mother served on corporate boards. They could afford Lakeside. Lakeside could afford the Teletype. This doesn't take away from his brilliance—plenty of rich kids at Lakeside didn't build Microsoft—but it highlights how crucial early access to technology really is.
The Tragic Loss of Kent Evans
While Paul Allen is the famous co-founder, Kent Evans was the original partner. Gates has often said that they would have stayed partners forever. They spent hours talking about the future of the world and how "one day every home would have a computer."
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When Evans died in a climbing accident, it devastated Gates. It also seemed to sharpen his focus. It was a brutal reminder of how little time there is. Some people argue this was the catalyst that pushed him from being a "talented kid" to a "relentless force."
Lessons for Today's Builders
If you’re looking at this story and thinking, "Well, I didn't have a Teletype in 1968," you're missing the point. The landscape has changed, but the mechanics of mastery haven't.
- Seek Out "The Machines": In 1968, it was a PDP-10. Today, it might be LLM architectures, biotech hardware, or decentralized finance protocols. Find the thing that is scarce and get as close to it as possible.
- Bug Hunting as Learning: Gates didn't learn by reading a textbook. He learned by trying to break things. If you want to understand a system, find its limits.
- Real-World Stakes: Writing a payroll system for a real company (ISI) taught Gates more than any classroom exercise ever could. If no one is paying you to solve a problem, the stakes aren't high enough yet.
- The Power of the Peer Group: Gates had Allen and Evans. You need people who are as obsessed as you are. You need people who will stay up until 3:00 AM arguing about a line of code or a business model.
Lakeside School still celebrates its most famous alum, but they also represent a very specific moment in time when a small group of kids realized the world was about to be rewritten in software. Gates didn't just learn to code there; he learned that he could control the world through a keyboard. That realization is what eventually turned a high school project into a global empire.
To apply this to your own career or your children's education, focus less on "learning the basics" and more on "securing the access." Access to mentors, access to high-level tools, and access to environments where it is okay to stay up all night breaking things. That is the true legacy of the Lakeside computer room.
Next Steps for Research:
- Look into the "Lakeside Mothers' Club" history to see how they funded the original computer link.
- Research the PDP-10 architecture to understand the specific constraints Gates was working under.
- Read "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell for a deeper statistical analysis of Gates’s timing.