His parents enrolled him, that fall, at Lakeside, an all-boys prep school noted for its rigorous academic environment. This was where Gates first got his love for computers, and had it not been for his parents' decision to send him there, he might very well have ended up a mathematician, or college professor. For it was at Lakeside that Gates got his first feel for what a real computer could do. .
When Gates was just finishing up his first year at Lakeside, the school purchased a relatively inexpensive Teletype machine. For a fairly hefty fee, users could type commands on the teletype and communicate via telephone line with the PDP-10 minicomputer in downtown Seattle. "Gates was in Paul Stocklin's math class when he got his first peek at the computer room. One spring day, Stocklin took his entire math class over to the upper school to see it. Under Stocklin's supervision, Gates typed in a few instructions and watched in awe as the teletype, after communicating with the PDP-10 several miles away, typed back the response. It was better than science fiction" (Wallace & Erickson, 21) .
Lakeside was one of the first schools in the country to have this technology; the computer room soon became a powerful magnet for some of Lakeside's brightest students, especially young William Gates. "Gates was immediately hooked. Whenever he had free time, he would run over to the upper school to get more experience on the system. But Gates was not the only computer-crazed kid at Lakeside. He found that he .
had to compete for time on the computer with a handful of others who were similarly drawn to the room as if by a powerful gravitational force. Among them was a soft-.
Sterling 3.
spoken, upper school student by the name of Paul Allen, who was two years older than Gates. Seven years later, the two classmates would form Microsoft, the most successful start up company in the history of American Business" (Wallace & Erickson, 21).
