“When the program wouldn’t work, [the professionals] would always complain that Bill’s code had bugs, but it was mostly their part of the program that didn’t work,” Sethna says.

Gates’ love for computing continued into college.

As a first-year, he was already taking graduate level Computer Science (CS) courses and, by his junior year, he had taken most of the CS courses the University had to offer.

For one course, Gates developed a baseball computer game and Znaimer remembers how Gates would stay up late and work for hours developing the algorithms to model the bounce of the ball and the angle of approach of the fielders.

“The projects he worked on for the first year were not commercial,” Znaimer said. “They were mostly done for the love of computing.”

But starting sophomore year, friends say Gates started talking about business more seriously. He was not interested in the short-term or the small scale. He wanted to really make an impact.

“[Gates] was going to inherit some money from his grandmother, who had started a bank, and it raised the stakes,” Sethna says. “Unless he could make more money than his grandmother was leaving him, there wasn’t a point.”

According to Sethna, the ideas that Gates would discuss with his friends fascinated them.

“He always had this idea about doing something big and spectacular,” Sethna says. “He used to talk about how every elevator would one day have a computer chip, and even used to talk about artificial intelligence. It was very exciting being around him.”

While still enrolled at Harvard, Gates put the finishing touches on the programming language BASIC for the Altair 8800 chipset.

Though BASIC was not the most powerful programming language of the time, it was realtively simple and easy to use.

Dropping In

Although Gates chose not to finish his career at Harvard, he was almost forced to leave prematurely after a run-in with the College’s Administrative Board.