Allen never attended Harvard. Only Gates did. Allen attended Washington State University, which he dropped out of after two years.
They were together at Harvard and left in pursuit of programming microcomputers.
Gates never left Harvard till a year after they had signed a contract with MITS in Albuquerque to write Basic for the Altaire. Allen went to work at MITS in Albuquerque by himself till Gates finally left Harvard and joined him.
He was to Gates III as Wozniak was to Jobs at Apple.
Not quite. Gates was every bit as good a programmer as Allen, if not better. Steve Jobs was no programmer.
Yes, stand corrected. But Allen visited Gates at Harvard as both were boyhood chums. When Gates would come home to Seattle, the two were always together as nerds drawn to the latest geek craze of the day.
The point is that Wall St. created an investment myth for mutual funds and the like, invest in nerd dropouts who know how to geek.
> “Not quite. Gates was every bit as good a programmer as Allen, if not better. Steve Jobs was no programmer.”
Yes, early on Gates was a good programmer but as all startups end up having to grapple with division of labor, Gates became the marketer, the promoter, on the phone all the time. His programming activity fell off and the bulk of the programming was left to Allen with Gates giving directions on what the customers were looking for.
By the time Gates had the chance meeting with IBM and had lied to say they had the product when they didn’t, Gates left it to Allen to do the assembly language coding to get the programming product ready for the meeting while Gates worked out the contract approach and parameters of what they wanted from IBM. Gates was a BASIC programmer with barely enough time to get a handle on Assembly language.
That’s why Microsoft would not exist without Allen. Gates did not have the time to be dishwasher, bottle brusher, busboy, cook, and waiter.
Jobs was technical enough to add, alter top level coding targets according to Wozniak. He was capable to be a programmer but fell into the startup groove of leaving coding to those that need to be closed up in a room with very little distraction.
Both Jobs and Gates fell into their roles by necessity and those roles were to pitch people about the tech. They became salesmen, marketers, promoters.