Philip Gale

Who was Philip Gale?

Philip Gale was an American pioneering Internet software developer, computer prodigy, and sophomore student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was notable for having written Total Access while at MIT, and was hired by EarthLink at the age of 16 to work on its development. Today the company has more than one million users. By the age of 17, Gale had earned roughly a million dollars' worth of stock options at Earthlink for his innovative ISP programs.

In 1995, Gale's father died from a heart attack, and friends said Gale struggled to come to terms with the loss. He returned to MIT in 1996 and became a music major. After complaints of being bored and depressed, on March 13, 1998, about 7:30 p.m., Gale broke a window and jumped to his death from a classroom on the fifteenth floor of a building on the MIT campus. He was nineteen.