#44 A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft

As I walked toward Harvard Square on a December weekend afternoon in nineteen seventy four, I had no inkling that my life was about to change. I was twenty one years old and at loose ends. My girlfriend had left a few weeks earlier to return to our hometown of Seattle, three thousand miles away. I had a dead end job at Honeywell.

And a crummy apartment. The one constant in my life those days was a Harvard undergraduate named Bill Gates. My partner in crime since we'd met at Lakeside School when he was in eighth grade and I was in tenth. Bill and I learned how to dissect computer code together. We started one failed business.

And work side by side on professional programming while still in our teens. It was Bill who had coaxed me to move to Massachusetts with a plan to quit school and join him at a tech firm. Then he reversed field to return to college. Like me. He seemed restless and ready to try something new.

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