Bill Gates had them both

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Gladwell points out how access and parent advocacy were catalysts for Gates’s founding Microsoft and igniting the PC revolution, which he would go on to dominate. It is well known that Gates dropped out of Harvard, but few know that Gates’s parents withdrew him from public school because he was bored and enrolled him in Lakeside, an elite private school in Seattle. That same year the Lakeside Mother’s Club put together a rummage sale and spent the proceeds on a computer terminal for the school. This would be standard for today, not in 1968. The Lakeside computer terminal was a new type of computer that shared processing power with a much larger computer in downtown Seattle. Gates would learn programming without being slowed by the laborious punch-card process used by the majority of computer terminals in existence at the time. Gates’s access to the computer terminal had allowed him to get thousands of programming-hours under his belt when he and fellow student and future business partner, Paul Allen, saw the cover of the January 1974 Popular Electronics magazine featuring the first do-it-yourself computer kit—the Altair 8800. That time spent programming and gaining knowledge about that rare thing in 1968—a computer— positioned him to seize the opportunity with the Altair 8800 and go on to make history. Writes Gladwell, “Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968.”

What if millions of eighth graders across the United States were given access to burgeoning industries, innovative technologies, and subjects they found exciting? What if their parents advocated for and supported that access? Gates had parents who fought for their son’s needs and access to a new field that few knew about at the time.

We should all do the same for our children.