Excerpt from the Book "Outliers, The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell.
Gleened only for the historical perspective Gladwell relays. I highly
recommend reading the book for an experience in original thinking by Gladwell
that provides a broader perspective on this subject.
CHAPTER TWO
The 10,000-Hour Rule
"IN HAMBURG, WE HAD TO PLAY FOR EIGHT HOURS."
1.
The University of Michigan opened its new Computer Center in 1971, in a
brand-new building on Beal Avenue in Ann Arbor, with beige-brick exterior
walls and a dark-glass front. The university's enormous mainfram computers
stood in the middle of a vast white room, looking, as one faculty member
remebers, "like one of the last scenes in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey,"
Off to the side were dozens of keypunch machines -- what passed in those days
for computer terminals. In 1971 this was state of the art. The University
of Michigan had one of the most advnaced computer science programs in the
world, and over the course of the Computer Center's life, thousands of
students passed throught the white room, the most famous of whom was a gawky
teenager name Bill Joy.
Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the Computer Center
opened. He was sixteen. He was tall and very thin, with a mop of unruly
hair. He had been voted "Most Studious Student" by his graduating class at
North Farmington High School, outside Detroit, which, as he puts it, meant
that he was a "no-date nerd." He had thought he might end up as a biologist
or a mathematician. But late in his freshman year, he stumbled across the
Computer Center--and he was hooked.
From that point on, the Computer Center was his life. He programmed
whenever he could. Joy got a job with a computer science professor so he
could program over the summer. In 1975, he enrolled in graduate school at
the University of California at Berkeley. There he buried himself even
deeper in the world of computer software. During the oral exams for his PhD,
he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the fly that, as one of
his many admirers has written, "so stunned his examiners [that] one of them
later compared the experience to 'Jesus confounding his elders.'"
Working in collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy
took on the task of rewriting UNIX, which was a software system developed by
AT&T for mainfram computers. Joy's version was very good. It was so good,
in fact, that it became--and remains--the operating system on which literally
millions of computers around the world run. "If you put your Mac in that
funny mode where you can see the code," Joy says, "I see things that I
remember typing in twenty-five years ago." And do you know who wrote much of
the software that allows you to access the Internet? Bill Joy.
After graduating from Berkeley, Joy cofounded the Silicon Valley firm
Sun Microsystems, which was one of the most critical players in the computer
revolution. There he rewrote another computer language--Java--and his legend
grew still furter. Among Silicon Valley insiders, Joy is spoken of with as
much awe as someone like Bill Gates of Microsoft. He is sometimes called the
Edison of the Itnernet. As the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter says,
"Bill Joy is one of the most influential people in the modern history of
computing."
The story of Bill Joy's genius has been told many times, and the
lesson is always the same. Here was a world that was the purest of
meritocracies. Computer programming didn't operate as an old-boy network,
where you got ahead because of money or connections. It was a wide-open
field in which all participants were judged solely on their talen and their
accomplishments. It was a world where the best men won, and Joy was clearly
one of those best men.
It would be easier to accept that version of events, however, if we
hadn't just looked at hockey and soccer players. There was supposed to be a
pure meritocracy as well. Only it wasn't It was a story of how the outliers
in a particular field reached their lofty status through a combination of
abilitiy, opportunity, and utterly arbitrary advantage.
Is it possible the same pattern of special opportunities operate in
the real world as well? Let's go back over the story of Bill Joy and find
out.
[Transcriber's note: You'll need to read the book to get 10,000
genius hour concept author defined. This transccription is to highlight
computer history only.]
2.
. .
3.
So, back to Bill Joy. It's 1971. He's tall and gawky and sixteen years old.
He's the math whiz, the kind of student that schools like MIT and Caltech and
the University of Waterloo attract by the hundreds. "When Bill was a little
kid, he wanted to know everything about everything way before he should've
even know he wanted to know," his father, William, says. "We answered him
when we could. And when we couldn't, we would just give him a book." When
it came time to apply to college, Joy got a perfect score on the math portion
of the Scholostic Aptitude Test. "It wasn't particularly hard," he says
matter-of-factly. "There was plenty of time to check it twice."
He has talent by the truckload. But that's not the only consideration.
It never is. The key to his development is that he stumbled across that
nondescript building on Beal Avenue.
In the early 1970's, when Joy was learning about programming,
computers were the size of rooms. A single machine (which might have less
power and memory than your microwave now has) could cost upwards of a million
dollars--and that's in 1970s dollars. Computers were rare. If you found
one, it was hard to get access to it; if you managed to get access, renting
time on it cost a fortune.
What's more, programming itself was extraordinarily tedious. This
was the era when computer programs were created using cardboard punch cards.
Each line of code was imprinted on the card using a keypunch machine. A
complex program might include hundreds, if not thousands, of these cards in
tall stacks. Once a program was ready, you walked over to whatever mainframe
computer you had access to and gave the stack of cards to an operator. Since
computers could handle only one task at a time, the operator made an
appointment for your program, and depending on how may people were ahead of
you in line, you might not get your cards back for a few hours or evan a day.
And if you made even a single error--even a typographical error--in your
program, you had to take the cards back, track down the error, and begin the
whole process again.
Under those circumstances, it was exceedingly difficult for anyone
to become a programming expert. Certainly becomming an expert by your early
twenties was all but impossible. When you can "program" for only a few
minutes out of every hour you spend in the computer room, how can you ever
get in ten thousand hours of practice? "Programming with cards," one
computer scientist from that era remembers, "did not teach you programming.
It taught you patience and proofreading."
It wasn't until the mid-1960s that a solution to the programming
problem emerged. Computers were finally powerful enough that they could
handle more than one "appointment" at once. If the computer's operating
system was rewritten, computer scientists realized, the machine's time could
be shared; the computer could be trained to handle hundres of tasks at the
same time. That, in turn, meant that programmers didn't have to physically
hand their stacks fo computer cards to the operator anymore. Dozens of
terminals could be built, all linked to the mainframe by a telephone line,
and everyone could be working--online--all at once.
Here is how one history of the period describes the advent of
time-sharing:
This was not just a revolution. It was a revelation. Forget the
operator, the card decks, the wait. With time-sharing you could sit at your
Teletype, bang in a couple of commands, and get an answer then and there.
Time-sharing was interactive. A program could ask for a response, wait for
you to type it in, act on it while you waited, and show you the result, all
in "real time."
This is where Michigan came in, because Michigan was one of the
first universities in the world to switch over to time-sharing. By 1967, a
prototype of the system was up and running. By the early 1970s, Michigan had
enough computing power that a hundred people could be programming
simultaneously in the Computer Center. "In the late sixties, early
seventies, I don't think there was anyplace else that was exactly like
Michigan," Mike Alexander, one of the pioneers of Michigan's computing
system, said. "Maybe MIT. Maybe Carnegie Mellon. Maybe Dartmouth. I don't
think there were any others."
This was the opportunity that greeted Bill Joy when he arrived on
the Ann Arbor campus in the fall of 1971. He hadn't chosen Michigan because
of its computers. He had never done anything with computers in high school.
He was interested in math and engineering. But when the programming bug hit
him in his freshman year, he found himself--by the happiest of accidents--in
one of the few places in the world where a seventeen-year-old could prgram
all he wanted.
"Do you know what the difference is between the computer cards and
time-sharing?" Joy says. "It's the difference between playing chess by mail
and speed chess." Programming wasn't an exercise in frustration anymore. It
was fun.
"I lived in the north campus, and the Computer Center was in the
north campus," Joy went on. "How much time did I spend there? Oh, a
phenomenal amout of time. It was open twenty-four hours. I would stay there
all night, and just walk home in the morning. In an average week in those
years, I was spending more time in the Computer Center than on my classes.
All of us down there had this recurring nightmare of forgetting to show up
for class at all, of not even realizing we were enrolled."
"The challenge was that they gave all the students an account with a
fixed amount of money, so your time would run out. When you signed on, you
would put in how long you wanted to spend on the computer. They gave you ,
like, an hour of time. That's all you'd get. But someone figured out that
if you put in 'time equals' and then a letter, like t equals k, they wouldn't
charge you he said, laughing at the memory. It was a bug in the software.
You could put in t equals k and sit there forever."
Just look at the stream of opportunities that came Bill Joy's way.
Because he happened to go to a farsighted shool like the University of
Michigan, he was able to practice on a time-sharing system instead of with
punch cards; because the Michigan system happened to have a bug in it, he
could program all he wanted; because the university was willing to spend the
money to keep the Computer Center open twenty-four hours, he could stay up
all night; and because he was able to put in so many hours, by the time he
happened to be presented with the opportunity to rewrite UNIX, he was up to
the task. Bill Joy was brilliant. He wanted to learn. That was a big part
of it. But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the
opportunity to learn how to be an expert.
"At Michigan, I was probably programming eight or ten hours a day,"
he went on. "By the time I was at Berkeley I was doing it day and night. I
had a terminal at home. I'd stay up until two or three o'clock in the
morning watching old movies and programming. Sometimes I'd fall asleep at
the keyborad"--he mimed his head falling on the keyboardd--"and you know how
the key repeats until the end, and it starts to go beep, beep, beep? After
that happens three times, you have to go to bed. I was still relatively
incompetent even when I got to Berkeley. I was proficient by my second year
there. That's when I wrote programs that are still in use today, thirty
years later." He paused for a moment to do the math in his head--which for
someone like Bill Joy doesn't take very long. Michigan in 1971. Programming
in earnest by sophomore year. Add in the summers, then the days and nights
in his first year at Berkeley. "So, so maybe ...ten thousand hours?" he
said, finally. "That's about right."
4.
. .
5.
Let's now turn to the history of Bill Gates. His story is almost as well
known as the Beatles'. Brilliant, young math whiz discovers computer
programming. Drops out of Harvard. Starts a little computer company called
Microsoft with his friends. Through sheer brilliance and ambition and guts
builds it into the giant of the software world That's the broad outline.
Let's dig a little bit deepr.
Gates father was a wealthy lawyer in Seattle, and his mother was the
daughter of a well-to-do-banker. As a child Bill was precocious and easily
bored by his studies. So his parents took him out of public school and, at
the beginning of seventh grade, sent him to Lakeside, a private school that
catered to Seattle's elite families. Midway through Gate's second year at
Lakeside, the school started a computer club.
"The Mothers' Club at school did a rummage sale every year, and
there was always the question of what the money would go to," Gates
remembers. "Some went to the summer program, where inner-city kids would
come up to the campus. Some of it would go for teachers. That year, they
put three thousand dollars into a computer terminal down in this funny little
room that we subsequently took control of. It was kind of an amazing thing."
It was an "amazing thing," of course, because this was 1968. Most
colleges didn't have computer clubs in the 1960s. Even more remarkable was
the kind of computer Lakeside bought. The school didn't have its students
learn prgramming by the laborious computer-card system, like virtually
everyone else was doing in the 1960s. Instead Lakeside installed what was
called an ASR-33 Teletype, which was a time-sharing terminal with a direct
link to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. "The whole idea of
time-sharing only got invented in nineteen sixty-five," Gates continued.
"Someone was pretty forward-looking." Bill Joy got an extraordinary, early
opportunity to learn programming on a time-share system as a freshman in
college, in 1971. Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth
grader in 1968.
From that moment forward, Gates lived in the computer room. He and
a number of others began to teach themselves how to use this strange new
device. Buying time on the mainframe computer the ASR was hooked up to was,
of course, expensive--even for a wealthy institution like Lakeside--and it
wasn't long before the $3,000 put up by the Mothers' Club ran out. The
parents raised more money. The students spent it. Then a group of
programmers at the University of Washington formed an outfit called Computer
Center Corporation (or C-Cubed), which leased computer time to local
companies. As luck would have it, one of the founders of the firm--Monique
Rona--had a son at Lakeside, a year ahead of Gates. Would the Lakeside
computer club, Rona wondered, like to test out the company's software
programs on the weekends in exchange for free programming time? Absolutely!
After school, Gates took the bus to the C-Cubed offices and programmed long
into the evening.
C-Cubed eventually went bankrupt, so Gates and his friends began
hanging around the computer center at the University of Washington. Before
long, they latched onto an outfit called ISI (Information Sciences Inc.)
which agreed to let them have free computer time in exchange for working on a
piece of software that could be used to automate company payrolls. In one
seven-month period in 1971, Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of
computer time on the ISI mainframe, Which averages out to eight hours a day,
seven days a week.
"It was my obsession," Gates says of his early high school years.
"I skipped athletics. I went up there at night. We were programming on
weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn't get twenty or thirty
hours in. There was a period where Paul Allen and I got in trouble for
stealing a bunch of passwords and crashing the system. We got kicked out. I
didn't get to use the computer the whole summer. This is when I was fifteen
and sixteen. Then I found out Paul had found a computer that was free at the
University of Washington. They had these machines in the medical center and
the physics department. They were on a twenty -four-hours schedule, but with
this big slack period, so that between three and six in the morning they
never sceduled anything." Gates laughed. "I'd leave at night, after my
bedtime. I could walk up to the University of Washington from my house. Or
I'd take the bus. That's why I'm always so generous to the University of
Washington, because they let me steal so much computer time." (Years later,
Gate's mother siad, "We always wonered why it was so hard for him to get up
in the morning.")
One of the founders of ISI, Bud Pembroke, then got a call from the
technology company TRW, which had just signed a contract to set up a computer
system at the huge Bonneville Power station in southern Washington State.
TRW desperately needed programmers familiar with the particular software the
power station used. In these early days of the computer revolution,
programmers with that kind of specialized experience were hard to find. But
Pembroke knew exactly who to call: those high school kids from Lakeside who
had been running up thousands of hours of computer time on the ISI mainfram.
Gates was now in his senior year. and somehow he manged to convince his
teachers to let him decamp for Bonneveille under the guise of an independent
study project. There he spent the spring writing code, supervised by a man
named John Norton, who Gates says taught him as much about prpgramming as
almost anyone he'd ever met.
Those five years, from eight grade through the end of high school,
were Bill Gate's Hamburg [re Beattle's 10,000 hours in Hamburg], and by any
measure, he was presented with an even more extraordinary series of
opportunities than Bill Joy.
Opportunity number one was that Gates got sent to Lakeside. How
many high schools in the world had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968?
Opportunity number two was that the mothers of Lakeside had enough money to
pay for the school's computer fees. Number three was that, when that money
ran out, one of the parents happened to work at C-Cubed, which happened to
need someone to check its code on the weekends, and which also happened not
to care if weekends turned in weeknights. number four was that Gates just
happened to find out about ISI, and ISI just happened to need someone to work
on its payroll software. Number five was that Gates happened to live within
walking distance of the University of Washington. Number six was that the
university happened to have free computer time between three and six in the
morning. Number seven was that TRW happened to call Bud Pembroke. Number
eight was that the best programmers Pembroke knew for that particular problem
happened to be two high school kids. And number nine was that Lakeside was
willing to let those kids spend their spring term miles away, writing code.
And what did virtually all of those opportunities have in common?
They gave Bill Gates extra time to practice. By the time Gates dropped out
of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own software
company, he'd been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive
years. He was way past ten thousand hours. How many teenagers in the world
had the kind of experience Gates had? "If there were fifty in the world, I'd
be stunned," he says. "There was C-Cubed and the payroll stuff we did, then
TRW--all those things came together. I had a better exposure to software
development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time,
and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events."
