How Did Bill Gates Learn to Code From a Dumpster?

David Senra reads that Bill Gates learned by pulling other people's code out of a dumpster. Guidebooks were rare, there was no internet, and there were no YouTube tutorials, so he and Paul Allen went looking in the trash.

C-cubed engineers threw out computer paper each day, printed with the code they had been working on. At night, after the employees left, Gates and Allen went behind the building to see what the dumpster held. Senra's question is how badly a person wants that information. He puts Gates next to Michael Dell: someone willing to do what it takes to get it. Gates was 13, learning on his own terms, with a $500,000 machine as his teacher.

About four months of that work, unconstrained by cost or time, minted a style that lasted decades. Finish a section, run it, get an instant answer, and try something else if it failed. He fell asleep at the terminal more times than he could remember, his nose on the keys for an hour or two, then woke up and started coding again.