How Bill Gates, the Altair 8800 and BASIC propelled me into the PC revolution

Have I told you the story about Bill Gates and me in those early days of personal computing? To be clear: Bill Gates is older than I am. In 1975, as Bill was leaving Harvard to start Microsoft, I had just skipped my last year of high school and started college. I was the youngest student in engineering school that first year -- the same year Bill and I were using the same computer technology: the Altair 8800 and the Digital Equipment PDP-10. My high school computing experience -- like Bill's -- was formative.