After the problem with General Electric's deal, Lakeside put together a deal with Computer Center Corporation.  One of their programmer's kids went here, and the school got a good deal.  It wasn't long until we got into the new machines.  The security in the machines was horrible, and we got in quick.  We caused a few system crashes, changed the record of our hours, and even broke the security entirely.  Eventually we were caught by living security, and booted off the computers for a couple weeks.

 

This is when we first started Lakeside Programmers Group.. Bill Gates, Paul Allen, me, and another hacker were the original members.  One of our first jobs came directly from our earlier hacking.  C-Cubed(what we called it) was losing business because of it's week security and crashes.  Who better to fix it than the people who can exploit them?  They hired us to find the bugs in their system.  Our pay: all the computer time we could handle.  We couldn't resist.  We used the opportunity to expand our abilities, and read computer text and picked the employees for info.

 

C-Cubed still had problems, and they tanked in 1970.  We needed to find a new computer source.  Information Sciences Inc. hired us to make them a payroll program.  Once again, we got all the computer time we could use, and the added bonus of royalties from our programs. 

 

Bill and Paul started their own project, Traf-O-Data, around this time too.  They made a small computer to measure traffic.  They made around $20,000 on that.  They've done a couple more projects, including debugging for a defense contractor.  On that project, they not only had to find the bugs, they had to fix them too.  Bill really started getting into programming then.