> I find this topic fascinating is because my first job, in high school, was writing software for the entity that controls the power grid in the Northwest
I wonder if somewhere in bowels of a northwest utility company there is a machine silently chugging away, running code written by a teenage Bill Gates, helping deliver electricity to the masses.
> My first job—other than being a page in Congress, which isn’t a real job—was doing a computer-software project for Bonneville Power Administration, which is a quasi-governmental entity that controls the power grid in the Northwest. We were computerizing the power grid. And the company that BPA had contracted with, TRW, was behind, so the people there scoured the country to see who really knew how to do a certain type of programming, and they found me, because I was sort of infamous as a boy wonder of a certain type of programming.
I've meet plenty of engineers at BPA. They do everything from generation, transmission, distribution, SCADA, AGC, and monitoring Hydro dams alongside the army corps. I'm really curious what he was doing, but I'm guessing he did a little bit in a very narrow section. I flipped through this book recently and wasn't very impressed to be honest.
This surprised me. Microsoft was started in the mid-70s. I'm in my early 30s and wasn't aware software was getting used in business much until the late 70s/early 80s.
I guess there were mainframes and not minicomputers? Still, surprising a high school kid would get a coding job in the early 70s.
Bill Gates went to an affluent high school that was one of a handful to have a computer students could use, as well as a computer club, this was in the late 60s I believe.
In Paul Allen's (auto?)biography he mentions that it was a group of mothers from the school that paid for the computer (or maybe the teletype terminal). I might be getting details mixed up, it's been a while since I've read his book.
As I remember it it was a teletype. In the same autobio, somewhat later, Allen and Gates got to learn from Steve Russell (of Spacewar) at his local company which I think might've had its own DEC mini. It's been a long time for me too since I read it.
> I find this topic fascinating is because my first job, in high school, was writing software for the entity that controls the power grid in the Northwest
I wonder if somewhere in bowels of a northwest utility company there is a machine silently chugging away, running code written by a teenage Bill Gates, helping deliver electricity to the masses.