Chapter 5

The first couple of days at Microsoft were for orientation and project group placement. While he was filling out the required employment paperwork, he noted that it required him to use his full legal name, John David Richardson. Later that day he was introduced to a number of people as John Richardson. When Bill Gates himself, called him John, he knew better than to try to correct him, so David was put to rest.

Over lunch he reminisced about how he became known as ‘David.’ It had been the start of third grade, the first day of class. As the teacher called the roll of students she noted an unusual number named John.

‘Will all those of you named ‘John’ please come to my desk.’

When they were all assembled, she called out the name of the first ‘John’ alphabetically by last name.

‘In my class, you will be called John. OK, you can go back to your seat.’

The next child was named ‘Johnny’, the next ‘Jack’, and the next Jacky. Then she got to him.

‘It seems we’ve run out of variations of the name ‘John.’ Young man, what is your middle name?’

‘David’, he replied.

‘Then in my classroom, you shall be called ‘David’.

After several weeks of confusion, the names became permanent and were embraced by teachers, parents and, most importantly, the kids as well. He was David to everyone except his father. So when the new family moved in next door, their only child, Awilda, only knew him as David.

Years later, when he thought back to that third grade class; he thought he had figured out why so many kids in his class were named John. He was born on January 18, 1964, less than two months after the shocking assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Kennedys were held in high regard, especially in the northeast, so it was only natural that parents would be partial to the name of ‘John’ for their male children born soon after that sad event.

“Hi, I’m Michael; this is Tom, and this is Gary. You’ve been assigned to our programming group.”

John, who had been in the middle of his daydream, jumped with surprise.

“Hi, I’m John. Pleased to meet you.”

“We’re looking for one more person to share our apartment; it’s the first floor of a two-family about five miles from here. It has two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom. We have access to the basement for storage and to do our laundry. The rent’s dirt cheap as long as we take care of taking out the garbage and keeping the hallway clean. The landlord is an elderly woman who lives on the second floor. We help her out as much as we can and she keeps our rent low; it’s only $200 a month, split four ways that’s fifty a month. You can’t beat that. What do you say, you in?”

“Sure. I just got into town last week; I’m staying at the Holiday Inn. That’s only a little more than I’m paying for two nights.”

“Fantastic. By the way, we call it “the Frat House. Come with us, we’ll show you our work room.”

Once in the room, Mike, the elected spokesman of the group, shut the door and began to speak.

“I’m sure you’re aware of our first operating system, MS-DOS, and its bastard step-child PC-Dos. We’re working on Windows, its successor. It’s a graphical extension for MS-DOS. I think we’re almost ready to release the first version. According to Bill, it will revolutionize computing as we know it. Here, take a look.”

He sat down at a machine that looked like an IBM PC but had no markings of any kind. With a few key-strokes he opened his first program. After hitting an icon in the corner, that screen shrunk but was still visible; now he opened a second screen that looked like a spreadsheet program. Then he opened a third screen, showing a graphic version of the numbers from the spreadsheet.

John was astonished. They had three programs running at the same time on one machine.

“All three programs are running together, one over the other, sharing data.”

When he tried to open a fourth screen, however, everything froze and an error message appeared.

“Dammit. We don’t think it’s a software problem, we think we’ve just outgrown the hardware. We’ve got the motherboard filled with all the RAM chips it will hold; it’s just not enough. Anyway, John, that’s not your problem; you’re going to be working with Gary and Tom on the OS/2 project in conjunction with IBM. Bill said you have some experience with the System 32.”

“That’s right, my father’s with IBM in Boca. I’ve been writing code for the 32 for the last five years. I’m pretty good with UNIX.”

“You’re that Richardson; I should have known. I’ve talked with your father several times on conference calls with Bill. You’ll fit right in.”

That evening, John picked up his personal items and checked out of the motel. He moved into the “Frat House,” sharing a bedroom with Mike. They each had a twin bed placed in the corners furthest away from the door. There was just enough room for one chest of drawers, two drawers for each. John realized right away why they called it the ‘frat house’. In the front windows, the guys had placed a sign with three large Greek letters; Mu, Sigma, & Iota. It was a play on the Microsoft Corporation name, substituting Incorporated for corporation.

For the next four years John worked in the OS/2 environment. Once the Microsoft version was released to original equipment manufacturers, he was shifted to the team working on a 32-bit version of Windows based on the OS/2 code.

Of course there were other groups working on other projects throughout their new headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Those projects were for developing software to run on the existing operating systems, and, where no hardware existed, developing the hardware and the software to run it.

Bill Gates was pushing harder and harder to develop software first. He always preached that if you weren’t considered by others to be on the cutting edge of technology, they’d drop you like a hot potato and someone would step in to take your place. He seemed to be everywhere at once: sitting in on meetings, critiquing new ideas, making snide remarks about presenters who seemed to be taking shortcuts, or who were not “pushing the envelope” far enough.

His programmers and systems people were working sixty-hour weeks, being fueled by Twinkies, Coke, and marshmallow peeps. Something had to give; for John that moment came in 1995. They had just released Windows 95. On the release date August 24, 1995, the ‘Frat Brothers’ decided to celebrate at a local tavern. None of them were real party animals, but that night they had indulged in a liberal amount of beer. Gary, Tom, and Mike had taken Gary’s new Firebird, while John drove his trusty 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. The need for speed overwhelmed common sense and the Firebird left the Beetle in the dust. Minutes later, on the freeway, it crossed over onto the shoulder of the road traveling too fast to make the bend, jumped the curb and struck a utility pole, killing all the occupants. John had taken the back roads home and was unaware of the accident until he was awakened the following morning by a Washington State Trooper.