[gustavo_duarte]

Gates is rumored to have scored a perfect 800 on the math portion or his SAT. He was studying Math at Harvard and published a paper in 'Discrete Mathematics' despite having dropped out before finishing undergrad:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... (pay wall, but you can see the abstract)

I think there's reason to believe he could have been an outstanding programmer. Has anybody read the source code for a program verifiably written by Gates? Was Donkey.bas really written by him?

[fuzzmeister]

I do not know enough about his background to say one way or another whether he was a great programmer, but getting an 800 on the SAT math section isn't exactly a legendary achievement. It is weighted so that the number of people getting an 800 is not insignificant.

[nostrademons]

That was less true when Gates took it than it is now. Now, scores are "recentered", so you can get a couple questions wrong and still get a perfect 800. This wasn't true when Gates took it - perfect meant perfect then.

At my undergrad, something like 1 in 10 incoming freshmen had perfect SAT scores, and I know a couple of folks at Google with perfect scores as well.

[dgordon]

"That was less true when Gates took it than it is now. Now, scores are "recentered", so you can get a couple questions wrong and still get a perfect 800."

Not true, for the math anyway. You can get a few wrong on the verbal section and still get an 800, and don't ask me how the writing works.

In any case, the effects of the 1994 recentering on higher-end scores (for whatever they're worth) are greatly exaggerated.

[acangiano]

He was an outstanding programmer: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_wri...

[wglb]

And this is what I had in mind when I suggesged "Argument bait". My own opinion is that they were both very good, with skill in different areas.