This BBC interview has Bill Gates reminiscing about how it all got started, including how Paul Allen lower him into the rubbish to recover a listing of the operating system source for the minicomputer they were playing with in the evenings. He also describes how he wrote a scheduling algorithm for his school that managed the classes, which had the interesting quirk that most of the girls in his year were in his classes.

As it happens I wrote a scheduling program for my father’s school back in probably 1980 or so, my father was talking about it the other day. My one replaced a system of cards which could have holes punched or clipped in them to allow selection using metal rods. Each pupil had a card and by using the rods the school could spot timetable clashes. Mine worked on an Apple II in UCSD Pascal and took many hours of churning to come up with a printed listing of an optimal solution. I remember it printed our rows of stars on the screen for each pass over the data to show it was still working. It was used by my father’s school for quite a few years.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.