Hunh, seems pretty close to what I remember watching from the sidelines.
(I used to tease Gates late at night in the computer room about playing with hobbyist computers, when there were so many powerful mainframes on the early ARPAnet (about 20 machines total) available to anyone who could telnet in, and so many interesting research projects going on around the net. My favorite was Englebart's NLS system, which was sorta barely useable on a remote terminal but still fascinating.)
Also, there weren't several PDP-1's, there was only one, which was used routinely as a display terminal for the PDP-10 (HARV-1 and HARV-10 by name in NCP (pre-TCP) days).
Thanks for sharing. I love to know about the early days of pioneers. It humanizes them and makes me feel what they did is something normal people, like me, can achieve.
From my experience, Gates is definitely a more-competitive-than-most kind of personality, but, let's face it, like most wildly successful folk, he was in the right place at the right time. (He drove hard to make sure he was there, it's true.)
As they say, success is where luck meets preparedness...
(I used to tease Gates late at night in the computer room about playing with hobbyist computers, when there were so many powerful mainframes on the early ARPAnet (about 20 machines total) available to anyone who could telnet in, and so many interesting research projects going on around the net. My favorite was Englebart's NLS system, which was sorta barely useable on a remote terminal but still fascinating.)
Also, there weren't several PDP-1's, there was only one, which was used routinely as a display terminal for the PDP-10 (HARV-1 and HARV-10 by name in NCP (pre-TCP) days).