The 1968 rummage sale that gave Bill Gates and Paul Allen a teletype, and what it still tells families about Lakeside today.
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Bill Gates and Paul Allen both attended Lakeside School in Seattle. In 1968 the Lakeside Mothers’ Club spent roughly $3,000 of rummage sale proceeds on a Teletype terminal and time-sharing access to a General Electric mainframe. Gates was a 13-year-old, Allen was two years ahead, and the room they met in became the origin of Microsoft. Lakeside’s alumni also include Adam West, Booth Gardner, Annie Leonard, and Corbin Carroll.
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The Rummage Sale That Bought a Teletype
Lakeside had no computer in 1968, and could not afford one. What it had was Bill Dougall, a Second World War Navy pilot who had become a mathematics and science teacher and who believed his students would need to understand computing before they reached college. Dougall persuaded the Lakeside Mothers’ Club to put the proceeds of its annual rummage sale, roughly $3,000, toward leasing an ASR-33 Teletype terminal and buying time on a remote General Electric mainframe. The terminal went into the basement of McAllister Hall.
The detail worth pausing on is how unusual this was. Time-sharing had only been invented a few years earlier, and most university graduate departments had nothing comparable. A thirteen-year-old at a Seattle day school had better computer access in 1968 than most doctoral students in the country. Gates has said as much himself, noting that somebody at the school was thinking a long way ahead.
The money ran out before the school year did. Rather than shutting the room down, Lakeside struck a deal with Computer Center Corporation, a local firm that had installed a DEC PDP-10. The students would hunt for bugs in the system; in exchange, they got computer time. That arrangement turned a school facility into something closer to an apprenticeship.
The Lakeside Programmers Group
Four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in 1968: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans. Allen had arrived at Lakeside in 1965 and was about two years ahead of Gates, who entered in seventh grade in 1967. None of this was curricular. The computer room ran as independent study, which meant the group could work after school, at night, and at weekends with nobody assigning them anything.
They took on real work. The group wrote a payroll program in COBOL for a company in Portland. Gates and Evans were asked by the school to automate Lakeside’s class scheduling, and their program worked, with the well-documented side effect that Gates ended up in classes with the girls he wanted to be near. He admitted it in a commencement address decades later. Allen went to Washington State in 1971, Gates graduated in 1973, and by 1975 the two had founded Microsoft. Weiland joined them.
| Year | What happened at Lakeside |
| 1965 | Paul Allen enrolls at Lakeside at age 12 |
| 1967 | Bill Gates enrolls in seventh grade |
| 1968 | Mothers’ Club rummage sale funds an ASR-33 Teletype and mainframe time |
| 1968 | Gates and Allen meet in the computer room; Lakeside Programmers Group forms |
| 1968-1970 | The group debugs a PDP-10 for Computer Center Corporation in exchange for computer time |
| 1971 | Allen graduates; Lakeside becomes coeducational through merger with St. Nicholas School |
| 1973 | Gates graduates |
| 1975 | Gates and Allen found Microsoft |
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Beyond Microsoft: The Wider Alumni List
The Microsoft story overshadows a genuinely broad list. Adam West, who played Batman in the 1960s series, graduated in 1946, when Lakeside was still a boys’ school. Booth Gardner served as Governor of Washington from 1985 to 1993. Annie Leonard became executive director of Greenpeace USA. Craig McCaw built McCaw Cellular Communications. E. Lockhart writes young adult fiction including “We Were Liars,” and Po Bronson is a working author and journalist. Corbin Carroll now plays outfield for the Arizona Diamondbacks, which is a useful reminder that Lakeside’s athletics program is not an afterthought.
What the list has in common is range rather than a single pipeline. Technology, politics, activism, acting, publishing, and professional sport is not the profile of a school that funnels students toward one destination.
What the Story Actually Tells Applicants
It is tempting to read the computer room as a story about resources. It is really a story about what Lakeside did with a student who would not stop. Gates was, by his classmates’ accounts, an unfocused seventh grader. What the school offered was room to go deep on one thing without being forced to be well-rounded about it first. That instinct still shows up in how Lakeside admits students. It refuses supplementary materials, caps recommendations, and watches Middle School applicants collaborate in a group rather than reciting achievements. Understanding what selective private schools actually look for matters more here than assembling a longer list of credentials.
The practical implication for a family is this. A child with a genuine, slightly obsessive interest is not a liability in this process. The application gives them very little room to prove it through volume, so it has to come through in their own writing and in how they talk about what absorbs them.
The Takeaway
A parent volunteer group ran a rummage sale, a teacher spent the proceeds on a terminal nobody had asked for, and two students used it more than anyone expected. That is the whole mechanism. Lakeside still bets on giving curious students unusual latitude, and its admissions process is built to find them rather than to reward the most polished file.
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