ible.
             Their story begins at Lakeside High, a private high school in Seattle,
             Washington. The Mothers= Club at Lakeside decided to purchase a
             computer terminal for the kids with proceeds from bake sales and
             rummage sales. Students at Lakeside became enthralled with this new
             toy. True to their innate curiosity, Gates and Allen began to dabble
             farther into the workings of the computer; Gates, for example, wrote
             his first computer program at the age of thirteenCa version of Tic, Tac,
             Toe. Because the computer terminal was so slow, one game of Tic, Tac,
             Toe took up most of a lunch break; if played on paper, a full 30
             seconds might have been required. Despite the simplicity of the
             program, it spawned the creative genius in both young men to tackle
             more challenging programs in the years ahead.
             Because the Mothers= Club was unable to afford continued use of
             computer time at $40 per hour, they decided to make it students=
             responsibility to purchase their own computer time. Most students
             complied by getting jobs outside school. Gates and Allen became
             programmers in the summers for compensation of computer time and $5000
             in cash. In his 1995 book The Road Ahead, Gates describes the
             mainframe computers of the early *70=s as A. . . temperamental monsters
             that resided in climate-controlled cocoons . . . connected by phone
             lines to clackety teletype terminals. . . .@ (11) He went on to
             explain that a personal home computer called the DPD-8 was actually
             available from Digital Equipment Corporation. According to Gates it
             was A. . . an $18,000 personal computer which occupied a rack two feet
             square and six feet high and had about as much computing capacity as a
             wristwatch does today . . . Despite its limitations, it inspired us to
             indulge in the dream that one day millions of individuals could
             ...