Excerpt from the Book "Outliers, The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell.  
Gleened only for the historical perspective Gladwell relays.  I highly 
recommend reading the book for an experience in original thinking by Gladwell 
that provides a broader perspective on this subject.



CHAPTER TWO

The 10,000-Hour Rule
"IN HAMBURG, WE HAD TO PLAY FOR EIGHT HOURS."


1.
The University of Michigan opened its new Computer Center in 1971, in a 
brand-new building on Beal Avenue in Ann Arbor, with beige-brick exterior 
walls and a dark-glass front.  The university's enormous mainfram computers 
stood in the middle of a vast white room, looking, as one faculty member 
remebers, "like one of the last scenes in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey,"  
Off to the side were dozens of keypunch machines -- what passed in those days 
for computer terminals.  In 1971 this was state of the art.  The University 
of Michigan had one of the most advnaced computer science programs in the 
world, and over the course of the Computer Center's life, thousands of 
students passed throught the white room, the most famous of whom was a gawky 
teenager name Bill Joy.  
     Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the Computer Center 
opened.  He was sixteen.  He was tall and very thin,  with a mop of unruly 
hair.  He had been voted "Most Studious Student" by his graduating class at 
North Farmington High School, outside Detroit, which, as he puts it, meant 
that he was a "no-date nerd."  He had thought he might end up as a biologist 
or a mathematician.  But late in his freshman year, he stumbled across the 
Computer Center--and he was hooked.
     From that point on, the Computer Center was his life.  He programmed 
whenever he could.  Joy got a job with a computer science professor so he 
could program over the summer.  In 1975, he enrolled in graduate school at 
the University of California at Berkeley.  There he buried himself even 
deeper in the world of computer software. During the oral exams for his PhD, 
he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the fly that, as one of 
his many admirers has written, "so stunned his examiners [that] one of them 
later compared the experience to 'Jesus confounding his elders.'"
	      Working in collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy 
took on the task of rewriting UNIX, which was a software system developed by 
AT&T for mainfram computers.  Joy's version was very good.  It was so good, 
in fact, that it became--and remains--the operating system on which literally 
millions of computers around the world run.  "If you put your Mac in that 
funny mode where you can see the code," Joy says, "I see things that I 
remember typing in twenty-five years ago."  And do you know who wrote much of 
the software that allows you to access the Internet?  Bill Joy.
     After graduating from Berkeley, Joy cofounded the Silicon Valley firm 
Sun Microsystems, which was one of the most critical players in the computer 
revolution.  There he rewrote another computer language--Java--and his legend 
grew still furter.  Among Silicon Valley insiders, Joy is spoken of with as 
much awe as someone like Bill Gates of Microsoft.  He is sometimes called the 
Edison of the Itnernet. As the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter says, 
"Bill Joy is one of the most influential people in the modern history of 
computing."
	 The story of Bill Joy's genius has been told many times, and the 
lesson is always the same.  Here was a world that was the purest of 
meritocracies.  Computer programming didn't operate as an old-boy network, 
where you got ahead because of money or connections.  It was a wide-open 
field in which all participants were judged solely on their talen and their 
accomplishments.  It was a world where the best men won, and Joy was clearly 
one of those best men.
     It would be easier to accept that version of events, however, if we 
hadn't just looked at hockey and soccer players.  There was supposed to be a 
pure meritocracy as well.  Only it wasn't  It was a story of how the outliers 
in a particular field reached their lofty status through a combination of 
abilitiy, opportunity, and utterly arbitrary advantage.
	 Is it possible the same pattern of special opportunities operate in 
the real world as well?  Let's go back over the story of Bill Joy and find 
out.
	 [Transcriber's note:  You'll need to read the book to get 10,000 
genius hour concept author defined.  This transccription is to highlight 
computer history only.]
	 
	 
2. 

. . . 

3. 

So, back to Bill Joy.  It's 1971.  He's tall and gawky and sixteen years old.  
He's the math whiz, the kind of student that schools like MIT and Caltech and 
the University of Waterloo attract by the hundreds.  "When Bill was a little 
kid, he wanted to know everything about everything way before he should've 
even know he wanted to know," his father, William, says.  "We answered him 
when we could.  And when we couldn't, we would just give him a book."  When 
it came time to apply to college, Joy got a perfect score on the math portion 
of the Scholostic Aptitude Test.  "It wasn't particularly hard," he says 
matter-of-factly.  "There was plenty of time to check it twice."
     He has talent by the truckload.  But that's not the only consideration.  
It never is.  The key to his development is that he stumbled across that 
nondescript building on Beal Avenue.
	 In the early 1970's, when Joy was learning about programming, 
computers were the size of rooms.  A single machine (which might have less 
power and memory than your microwave now has) could cost upwards of a million 
dollars--and that's in 1970s dollars.   Computers were rare.  If you found 
one, it was hard to get access to it; if you managed to get access, renting 
time on it cost a fortune.
	 What's more, programming itself was extraordinarily tedious.  This 
was the era when computer programs were created using cardboard punch cards.  
Each line of code was imprinted on the card using a keypunch machine.  A 
complex program might include hundreds, if not thousands, of these cards in 
tall stacks.  Once a program was ready, you walked over to whatever mainframe 
computer you had access to and gave the stack of cards to an operator.  Since 
computers could handle only one task at a time, the operator made an 
appointment for your program, and depending on how may people were ahead of 
you in line, you might not get your cards back for a few hours or evan a day.  
And if you made even a single error--even a typographical error--in your 
program, you had to take the cards back, track down the error, and begin the 
whole process again.
	 Under those circumstances, it was exceedingly difficult for anyone 
to become a programming expert.  Certainly becomming an expert by your early 
twenties was all but impossible.  When you can "program" for only a few 
minutes out of every hour you spend in the computer room, how can you ever 
get in ten thousand hours of practice?  "Programming with cards," one 
computer scientist from that era remembers, "did not teach you programming.  
It taught you patience and proofreading."
	 It wasn't until the mid-1960s that a solution to the programming 
problem emerged.  Computers were finally powerful enough that they could 
handle more than one "appointment" at once.  If the computer's operating 
system was rewritten, computer scientists realized, the machine's time could 
be shared; the computer could be trained to handle hundres of tasks at the 
same time.  That, in turn, meant that programmers didn't have to physically 
hand their stacks fo computer cards to the operator anymore.  Dozens of 
terminals could be built, all linked to the mainframe by a telephone line, 
and everyone could be working--online--all at once.
	 Here is how one history of the period describes the advent of 
time-sharing:
	 
	 This was not just a revolution.  It was a revelation.  Forget the 
operator, the card decks, the wait.  With time-sharing you could sit at your 
Teletype, bang in a couple of commands, and get an answer then and there.  
Time-sharing was interactive.  A program could ask for a response, wait for 
you to type it in, act on it while you waited, and show you the result, all 
in "real time."
	 
	 This is where Michigan came in, because Michigan was one of the 
first universities in the world to switch over to time-sharing.  By 1967, a 
prototype of the system was up and running.  By the early 1970s, Michigan had 
enough computing power that a hundred people could be programming 
simultaneously in the Computer Center.  "In the late sixties, early 
seventies, I don't think there was anyplace else that was exactly like 
Michigan," Mike Alexander, one of the pioneers of Michigan's computing 
system, said.  "Maybe MIT.  Maybe Carnegie Mellon.  Maybe Dartmouth.  I don't 
think there were any others."
	 This was the opportunity that greeted Bill Joy when he arrived on 
the Ann Arbor campus in the fall of 1971.  He hadn't chosen Michigan because 
of its computers.  He had never done anything with computers in high school.  
He was interested in math and engineering.  But when the programming bug hit 
him in his freshman year, he found himself--by the happiest of accidents--in 
one of the few places in the world where a seventeen-year-old could prgram 
all he wanted.
	 "Do you know what the difference is between the computer cards and 
time-sharing?" Joy says. "It's the difference between playing chess by mail 
and speed chess."  Programming wasn't an exercise in frustration anymore.  It 
was fun.
	 "I lived in the north campus, and the Computer Center was in the 
north campus," Joy went on.  "How much time did I spend there? Oh, a 
phenomenal amout of time.  It was open twenty-four hours.  I would stay there 
all night, and just walk home in the morning.  In an average week in those 
years, I was spending more time in the Computer Center than on my classes.  
All of us down there had this recurring nightmare of forgetting to show up 
for class at all, of not even realizing we were enrolled."
	 "The challenge was that they gave all the students an account with a 
fixed amount of money, so your time would run out.  When you signed on, you 
would put in how long you wanted to spend on the computer.  They gave you , 
like, an hour of time.  That's all you'd get.  But someone figured out that 
if you put in 'time equals' and then a letter, like t equals k, they wouldn't 
charge you he said, laughing at the memory.  It was a bug in the software.  
You could put in t equals k and sit there forever."
	 Just look at the stream of opportunities that came Bill Joy's way.  
Because he happened to go to a farsighted shool like the University of 
Michigan, he was able to practice on a time-sharing system instead of with 
punch cards; because the Michigan system happened to have a bug in it, he 
could program all he wanted; because the university was willing to spend the 
money to keep the Computer Center open twenty-four hours, he could stay up 
all night; and because he was able to put in so many hours, by the time he 
happened to be presented with the opportunity to rewrite UNIX, he was up to 
the task.  Bill Joy was brilliant.  He wanted to learn.  That was a big part 
of it.  But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the 
opportunity to learn how to be an expert.
	 "At Michigan, I was probably programming eight or ten hours a day," 
he went on.  "By the time I was at Berkeley I was doing it day and night.  I 
had a terminal at home.  I'd stay up until two or three o'clock in the 
morning watching old movies and programming.  Sometimes I'd fall asleep at 
the keyborad"--he mimed his head falling on the keyboardd--"and you know how 
the key repeats until the end, and it starts to go beep, beep, beep?  After 
that happens three times, you have to go to bed.  I was still relatively 
incompetent even when I got to Berkeley.  I was proficient by my second year 
there.  That's when I wrote programs that are still in use today, thirty 
years later."  He paused for a moment to do the math in his head--which for 
someone like Bill Joy doesn't take very long.  Michigan in 1971. Programming 
in earnest by sophomore year.  Add in the summers, then the days and nights 
in his first year at Berkeley.  "So, so maybe ...ten thousand hours?" he 
said, finally.  "That's about right."
	 
4.

. . .

5.

Let's now turn to the history of Bill Gates.  His story is almost as well 
known as the Beatles'.  Brilliant, young math whiz discovers computer 
programming.  Drops out of Harvard.  Starts a little computer company called 
Microsoft with his friends.  Through sheer brilliance and ambition and guts 
builds it into the giant of the software world  That's the broad outline.  
Let's dig a little bit deepr.
     Gates father was a wealthy lawyer in Seattle, and his mother was the 
daughter of a well-to-do-banker.  As a child Bill was precocious and easily 
bored by his studies.  So his parents took him out of public school and, at 
the beginning of seventh grade, sent him to Lakeside, a private school that 
catered to Seattle's elite families.  Midway through Gate's second year at 
Lakeside, the school started a computer club.
	 "The Mothers' Club at school did a rummage sale every year, and 
there was always the question of what the money would go to,"  Gates 
remembers.  "Some went to the summer program, where inner-city kids would 
come up to the campus.  Some of it would go for teachers.  That year, they 
put three thousand dollars into a computer terminal down in this funny little 
room that we subsequently took control of.  It was kind of an amazing thing."
	 It was an "amazing thing," of course, because this was 1968.  Most 
colleges didn't have computer clubs in the 1960s.  Even more remarkable was 
the kind of computer Lakeside bought.  The school didn't have its students 
learn prgramming by the laborious computer-card system, like virtually 
everyone else was doing in the 1960s.  Instead Lakeside installed what was 
called an ASR-33 Teletype, which was a time-sharing terminal with a direct 
link to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle.  "The whole idea of 
time-sharing only got invented in nineteen sixty-five," Gates continued.  
"Someone was pretty forward-looking."  Bill Joy got an extraordinary, early 
opportunity to learn programming on a time-share system as a freshman in 
college, in 1971.  Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth 
grader in 1968.  
	 From that moment forward, Gates lived in the computer room.  He and 
a number of others began to teach themselves how to use this strange new 
device.  Buying time on the mainframe computer the ASR was hooked up to was, 
of course, expensive--even for a wealthy institution like Lakeside--and it 
wasn't long before the $3,000 put up by the Mothers' Club ran out.  The 
parents raised more money.  The students spent it.  Then a group of 
programmers at the University of Washington formed an outfit called Computer 
Center Corporation (or C-Cubed), which leased computer time to local 
companies.  As luck would have it, one of the founders of the firm--Monique 
Rona--had a son at Lakeside, a year ahead of Gates.  Would the Lakeside 
computer club, Rona wondered, like to test out the company's software 
programs on the weekends in exchange for free programming time?  Absolutely!  
After school, Gates took the bus to the C-Cubed offices and programmed long 
into the evening. 
	 C-Cubed eventually went bankrupt, so Gates and his friends began 
hanging around the computer center at the University of Washington.  Before 
long, they latched onto an outfit called ISI (Information Sciences Inc.) 
which agreed to let them have free computer time in exchange for working on a 
piece of software that could be used to automate company payrolls.  In one 
seven-month period in 1971, Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of 
computer time on the ISI mainframe,  Which averages out to eight hours a day, 
seven days a week.
	 "It was my obsession," Gates says of his early high school years.  
"I skipped athletics.  I went up there at night.  We were programming on 
weekends.  It would be a rare week that we wouldn't get twenty or thirty 
hours in.  There was a period where Paul Allen and I got in trouble for 
stealing a bunch of passwords and crashing the system.  We got kicked out.  I 
didn't get to use the computer the whole summer.  This is when I was fifteen 
and sixteen.  Then I found out Paul had found a computer that was free at the 
University of Washington.  They had these machines in the medical center and 
the physics department.  They were on a twenty -four-hours schedule, but with 
this big slack period, so that between three and six in the morning they 
never sceduled anything."  Gates laughed.  "I'd leave at night, after my 
bedtime.  I could walk up to the University of Washington from my house.  Or 
I'd take the bus.  That's why I'm always so generous to the University of 
Washington, because they let me steal so much computer time."  (Years later, 
Gate's mother siad, "We always wonered why it was so hard for him to get up 
in the morning.")
	 One of the founders of ISI, Bud Pembroke, then got a call from the 
technology company TRW, which had just signed a contract to set up a computer 
system at the huge Bonneville Power station in southern Washington State.  
TRW desperately needed programmers familiar with the particular software the 
power station used.  In these early days of the computer revolution, 
programmers with that kind of specialized experience were hard to find.  But 
Pembroke knew exactly who to call: those high school kids from Lakeside who 
had been running up thousands of hours of computer time on the ISI mainfram.  
Gates was now in his senior year. and somehow he manged to convince his 
teachers to let him decamp for Bonneveille under the guise of an independent 
study project.  There he spent the spring writing code, supervised by a man 
named John Norton, who Gates says taught him as much about prpgramming as 
almost anyone he'd ever met.
	 Those five years, from eight grade through the end of high school, 
were Bill Gate's Hamburg [re Beattle's 10,000 hours in Hamburg], and by any 
measure, he was presented with an even more extraordinary series of 
opportunities than Bill Joy.
	 Opportunity number one was that Gates got sent to Lakeside.  How 
many high schools in the world had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968?  
Opportunity number two was that the mothers of Lakeside had enough money to 
pay for the school's computer fees.  Number three was that, when that money 
ran out, one of the parents happened to work at C-Cubed, which happened to 
need someone to check its code on the weekends, and which also happened not 
to care if weekends turned in weeknights.  number four was that Gates just 
happened to find out about ISI, and ISI just happened to need someone to work 
on its payroll software.  Number five was that Gates happened to live within 
walking distance of the University of Washington.  Number six was that the 
university happened to have free computer time between three and six in the 
morning.  Number seven was that TRW happened to call Bud Pembroke.  Number 
eight was that the best programmers Pembroke knew for that particular problem 
happened to be two high school kids.  And number nine was that Lakeside was 
willing to let those kids spend their spring term miles away, writing code.
	 And what did virtually all of those opportunities have in common?  
They gave Bill Gates extra time to practice.  By the time Gates dropped out 
of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own software 
company, he'd been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive 
years.  He was way past ten thousand hours.  How many teenagers in the world 
had the kind of experience Gates had?  "If there were fifty in the world, I'd 
be stunned," he says.  "There was C-Cubed and the payroll stuff we did, then 
TRW--all those things came together.  I had a better exposure to software 
development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, 
and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events."