Early yearsGates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was rich; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the boards of First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way, and his father, J. W. Maxwell, was the president of a national bank. Gates has an older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and a younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had dropped the "III" suffix.[6] Early in his life, Gates' parents had a legal career in mind for him.[7]At thirteen, he enrolled in Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school.[8] When he was in eighth grade, the school's Mothers Club used proceeds from the Lakeside School yard sale to purchase an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. ] Gates became interested in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from mathematics classes to pursue his interest. On this machine he wrote his first computer program: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected on that moment, he commented and said, “There was something nice about the car.” [10] After the Mothers Club's donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students - Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland and Kent Evans - for the summer after catching them exploiting bugs in the operating system to get free time on the computer.[11] At the end of the ban, the four students offered to debug CCC's software in exchange for free computer time. Instead of using the system via teleprinter, Gates went to the CCC offices and studied the source code for various programs running on the system, including FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The agreement with CCC continued until 1970, when it ceased operations. The following year, Information Sciences Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them with computer time and royalties. After his administrators learned of his programming skills, Gates wrote the school's computer program to program students in classes.