proposal to Burroughs. I said, “I’ll write you an ALGOL compiler for $5,000. But I can’t implement all of ALGOL for this; I am just one guy. Let’s leave out procedures.” Well, this is a big hole in the language! Burroughs said, “No, you’ve got to put in procedures.” I said, “Okay, I will put in procedures, but you’ve got to pay me $5,500.” That’s what happened. They paid me $5,500, which was a fairly good salary in those days. So between graduating from Case and going to Caltech, I worked on this compiler.

Heading out to California, I drove 100 miles each day and then sat in a motel and wrote code.

 

But he rejects “compiler writer” as a career, and decides what is important in life. Then a startup company came to me and said, “Don, write compilers for us and we will take care of finding computers to debug them. Name your price.” I said, “Oh, okay, $100,000,” assuming that this was

[outrageous]. The guy didn’t blink. He agreed. I didn’t blink either. I said, “I’m not going to do it. I just thought that was an impossible number.” At that point I made the decision in my life that I wasn’t going to optimize my income.

I spent a day that summer looking at the mathematics of how fast linear probing works. I got lucky, and I solved the problem. I figured out some math, and I kept two or three sheets of paper with me and I typed