Editing Traf-O-Data (section)

==Traffic counting==
{{Cleanup section|reason=General rewording|date=April 2024}}
[[File:Traf-O-Data_Business_Card.jpg|thumb|250px|Business card showing the names of Gates, Allen, and Gilbert from the [[New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science]] ]]
State and local governments frequently perform traffic surveys with a pneumatic road tube traffic counter.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last1=Bruun |first1=Maja Hojer |title=The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology |last2=Wahlberg |first2=Ayo |last3=Douglas-Jones |first3=Rachel |last4=Hasse |first4=Cathrine |last5=Hoeyer |first5=Klaus |last6=Kristensen |first6=Dorthe Brogård |last7=Winthereik |first7=Brit |publisher=Springer Nature |year=2022 |isbn=978-981-16-7083-1 |location=Singapore |pages=281 |language=en}}</ref> Rubber hoses are stretched across a road and wheels of passing vehicles create air pulses that are recorded by a roadside counter.<ref name=":0" /> In the 1970s the counts were mechanically recorded on a roll of [[Punched tape|paper tape]]. The time and number of axles were punched as a 16-bit pattern into the paper tape. (The common [[Teletype Corporation|Teletype]] paper tape uses only 7&nbsp;bits.) Cities would hire private companies to translate the data into reports that traffic engineers could use to adjust traffic lights or improve roads.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen were high school students at [[Lakeside School (Seattle)|Lakeside School]] in Seattle. The Lakeside Programmers Group got free computer time on various computers in exchange for writing computer programs. Gates and Allen thought they could process the traffic data cheaper and faster than the local companies by building a computer that could process all the traffic tapes using the [[Intel 8008|Intel 8008 processor]].<ref name=":1">{{Cite book |last=Becraft |first=Michael B. |title=Bill Gates: A Biography |date=2014-08-26 |publisher=ABC-CLIO |isbn=978-1-4408-3013-6 |location=Santa Barbara, CA |pages=11 |language=en}}</ref> The goal was to sell such machines to states and local governments as a time and cost-saving tool. 

Since Gates and Allen did not know how to build a computer capable of processing data on paper tapes, they recruited Paul Gilbert to help in building a prototype that can manually read the hole-patterns in the paper tape and transcribe the data onto computer cards.<ref name=":1" /> Gilbert became the third partner.<ref name=":1" /> Gates then used a computer at the University of Washington to produce the traffic flow charts. (Paul Allen's father was a librarian at UW.) This was the beginning of Traf-O-Data.<ref name="CDC">{{cite book | last=Wallace | first=James | author2=Jim Erickson | title=Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire | publisher=John Wiley & Sons | date=1992 | pages=[https://archive.org/details/harddrivebillgat00wall_0/page/42 42–46] | isbn=0-471-56886-4 | url-access=registration | url=https://archive.org/details/harddrivebillgat00wall_0/page/42 }}</ref>