Microsoft Co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen pose for a portrait in 1984 in Seattle, Washington. Doug Wilson/Getty Images
Doug Wilson/Getty Images
It all started with two kids who shared a geeky hobby.
Growing up in Seattle, childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen were obsessed with an emerging industry called computing. As teenagers, they haunted the University of Washington’s computer lab, the only place they could get their hands on the technology that so fascinated them.
By 1971, they’d taken so many liberties with the lab’s equipment that its director