Bill Gates Talks About 6 Moments in His Life

Hi, I'm Bill Gates, and these are moment from my life.

(whimsical music)

Paul Allen, who's the co-founder of Microsoft,

and I, are at Lakeside High School,

and that's a teletype terminal

that connects over a phone line to a GE timeshare computer,

where you can write BASIC programs.

I was 13 when that teletype showed up,

and I'd done super well in a math exam,

best in the state, so Paul, who was two years

ahead of me, when the computer's kinda complicated,

he kinda challenged me to say, hey,

math, can you figure this out?

And so he and I became good friends despite

that age difference, and Paul had read a lot

of science fiction, and knew a lot of things I didn't.

So our friendship and partnership started

up from that time forward.

And in this computer room, the teachers would come in

and try to figure it out, but they ended

up wasting a lot of money, and so we kinda took

over the computer room, and taught the

other kids how to program.

We're writing huge, complex programs in BASIC,

trying to solve hard problems.

A lot of kids were interested at first,

but they were a small group that stayed in,

day and night, using the thing.

It's still there.

My daughter, who goes that school, calls it The Shrine.

(whimsical music)

So there's kind of an array of different computers.

There were a lot of personal computers way

before the IBM PC that comes out in 1981.

Microsoft had its software on all of them,

the Apple II, the Commodore PET,

the Radio Shack TRS-80, about a dozen machines

that were done in Japan.

We worked on a ton of machines.

We were spreading the idea that

these microprocessor-based machines would be revolutionary.

The one right here was the first portable computer.

That's a eight-line LCD, with 32 characters across.

That's called the Model 100.

That's the last piece of software

that I was the primary engineer,

and then I sort of more managed people.

Well, I still coded, but this is the project

where I'm totally in charge, and

actually figuring out how to fit

into a 32 K-byte ROM, a floating-point BASIC,

and a text editor, and a director-manager.

So that was a super fun, very difficult project.

So I wrote code.

Even to this day, I do some architecture,

things on the various products.

But yeah, I miss the elegance of writing super tight code.

Almost nobody does that now, 'cause memory is

so big, people can be a bit more sloppy

than you could be back then.

The microprocessor had been coming along,

and Paul, in 1971, showed me the 4004,

which is the first Intel product,

and we talked about Moore's Law.

I'd written BASIC for a lot of mini-computers.

They were still quite expensive,

and when he showed me the 8008,

I said, now it's not good enough.

But the 8080, that's 1973, that was good enough

for me to do a BASIC interpreter,

so that became our first product.

And that was the revolution.

That was the thing that ushered in personal computing.

The creation of Microsoft, and being part

of the personal computer industry,

and then the Internet, and all the great things

that come out of that.

And I feel super, super lucky

to have had a central involvement,

along with thousands of others, in those days.

Well, Windows 95 was a big milestone for the company.

This series of events was immensely fun

for everybody who's involved, because

we had been working day and night.

These were pretty maniacal days,

in terms of, work was everything.

Even I didn't believe in weekends, or vacations.

The team, pretty broadly, had worked super, super hard.

The marketing people had figured out

how to take this phenomena,

and create a lot of excitement around it.

All over the world, we had things being lit up

in the Windows colors, we had big events all over the world.

There had been a lot of anticipation,

because the beta test was literally hundreds

of thousands of copies of this thing,

and all the developers who had written applications

for it were waiting, because the memory capacity

you got, in this generation machines,

was so much better than what came before.

This was the ushering in of the graphics interface,

moving from character mode, which all the DOS

before this had been, to this graphics mode.

And Windows 95, on the PC, and then the MacOS on the Mac,

were bringing graphics interface into the mainstream.

It had been sort of invented at Xerox park,

with some very expensive, low-volume-type machines.

But Windows 95, we brought Office across,

and this product was phenomenally successful,

cut on in a big way.

Windows, itself, I had bet the company on,

all the way back in 1983.

And so there's 12 years of getting the Windows concept

to be faster, and the processors are getting better,

and here, it clearly had arrived.

And there was no doubt that, versus anything else

out there, this was the mainstream of computing,

and all the developers were there

to take full advantage of it.

(upbeat music)

Yeah, so this is Melinda, who I was

not yet married to at the time, although we were engaged.

We're out on the Serengeti for our first trip to Africa,

and we're kind of looking around.

We had took a bunch of friends with us.

It was the first long vacation I'd ever taken.

It was a two week vacation,

which seemed quite extreme to me,

but it was great fun, and very eye-opening.

It's important, because it's the start

of our marriage, but also, some

of the insights that led to the Foundation being focused

on health of the poorest, particularly in Africa,

came from the curiosity about the people,

and were living in very tough conditions.

And so subsequent to this, she and I did a lot of reading,

with this idea that, okay, someday,

the Microsoft wealth was gonna go back to the public,

and how the lens towards innovation,

and really helping those most in need, how could we do that?

Well, in Microsoft, my early partner was Paul Allen,

and then Steve Ballmer was my partner.

Now, Melinda's an even totally equal partner

in all the Foundation work we're doing.

So she and I run it together.

It was so fascinating, the relationships we're building,

learning all this new stuff, to have somebody

to brainstorm with about it, made it a lot more fun.

Things like writing letters together,

giving speeches together, we had to learn

how to bring out the best of the

both of us in doing those things.

But yeah, it was always clear we wanted to do it together.

(lighthearted music)

Yeah, we're backstage at the Microsoft CEO conference,

and Warren's telling me a story

about a business that he had invested in.

It was a guy calling him on the phone,

and trying to tell him he had an investment

that Warren should make, and Warren was explaining

why it was pretty clearly not something

that he was gonna waste money on.

He's been such a great friend,

and so clever, and I've learned so much from him.

He's got an amazing sense of humor.

Well, I was very lucky that we were introduced,

and it was 1991, where I was quite reluctant

to take any time away from work.

Within a few minutes of meeting him,

he was asking questions about why could Microsoft compete

with IBM, and what were the dynamics in our business?

They were really amazingly good questions

that nobody really had asked before,

and then I could ask him about his broader view

of business, and so we became great friends,

right from that first meeting.

(upbeat music)

Well, a hobby of mine, so I was playing tennis,

and so it's a real privilege to do a fundraising event

where I was a doubles partner with Roger Federer.

You know he's gonna take care of it.

You practicing yours, as loud as you can.

Actually, when an amateur's playing

in something like this, moving up

to the net is particularly valuable,

because you can hit quite attractive shots up at the net.

So a blast for everybody involved.

Now, these are a few moments from my life.

Thanks for watching.