Bill Gates' presence as a titan of the computing industry is now taken for granted, but before all that he was just a (rather extraordinary) college student. Biographer Walter Isaacson takes a look at the software mogul's earlier years at Harvard for the Harvard Gazette. It's a look back at a human being with incredible drive and focus, whether it's Gates' penchant for marathon 36-hour study sessions, or his intense dedication to poker. The piece touches upon the early friendship between Gates and a young Steve Ballmer — they connected over Singin' In The Rain and A Clockwork Orange — as well as the eight-week coding session that led Gates and Paul Allen to create a working BASIC interpreter for the Altair personal computer. If you'd like to learn more about the man that would go on to change computing forever, it's definitely worth the read.