Wilcox Hall, University of Washington

This was the UW computer center, then known as Roberts Hall Annex, 40 years ago when two kids named Paul Allen and Bill Gates hung out here, honing their programming skills using punched cards on a CDC 6400 and a Burroughs 5500.

Gates and Allen used many UW computers, across the campus, but the projects they worked on in what’s now Wilcox Hall included the first version of the scheduling software that they created for Lakeside School. (Gates later told the BBC that he gamed the system to get more of the “interesting” girls in his classes.) Gates and Allen also worked here on the program that they used to print out Traf-O-Data traffic volume analyses.

There’s no trace of their activities in Wilcox Hall today. But if you take a walk through the aging building’s halls, it’s not hard to picture them there.

Details: University of Washington (campus map). The building today is a short walk from the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering, and it’s fun to visit them in tandem.

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