Bill Gates and Paul Allen hacked their school's computer to help Gates meet girls

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Bill Gates

Gus Ruelas/Reuters

Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen famously met while attending Lakeside School, a private school in Seattle.

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Although Allen was two years ahead of Gates in school, they became friends over a shared love of computers.

One of the things they used to do was to hack into computers.

They even came up with a scheme to hack computers to help Gates meet girls: they enrolled him into classes where he was the only boy, he confessed in an interview with BBC.

young bill gates

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Young Bill Gates.

Unfortunately, that didn't really help him, he told BBC's Kirsty Young (emphasis ours):

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"Paul did the computer scheduling with me. Unfortunately for him he was two years ahead of me and he was off to college by then. So I was the one who benefited by being able to have the nice girls at least sit near me. It wasn't that I could talk to them or anything - but they were there. I think I was particularly inept at talking to girls, or thinking, 'OK - do you ask them out, do you not?' When I went off to Harvard I was a little bit more sociable. But I was below average on talking to girls."

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