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Bringing Up Bill
theodp writes "Over at the WSJ, Bill Gates Sr. describes what it took to turn an unruly 12-year-old into Microsoft's founder and the world's richest man. This included throwing a glass of cold water in the boy's face when he was having a particularly heated argument with his mother at the dinner table. 'He was nasty,' says Libby Armintrout, Bill's younger sister. 'I'm at war with my parents over who is in control,' Bill Gates recalls telling a therapist, who told his parents that their son would ultimately win the battle for independence, and their best course of action was to ease up on him. The rest, as they say, is history. The accompanying Gates Family Album is also worth a look."
His life achievements notwithstanding, obviously Bill never outgrew this mentality, from his "open letter to hobbyists" on the antics of Microsoft, especially from the 90s onward...
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
mnem
"There out to be a law against you coming around... you should be made to wear earphones..."
Seriously? Arm In Trout? That's gross.
How is this worthy of front page news? It should be tucked in Idle. It's nothing about anything break through or even cool. It's just....well...I'm not sure what it is.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
He has made more money and pissed off more self-righteous nerds than I could ever hope to. Bill Gates is my hero.
He grew up in a family with a moderately oppressive mother and a caring yet distant father, who valued intelligence. He talked like a lawyer (he was one), and while he cared about his son, if you wanted his respect you needed to be able to verbalize a coherent and logical argument. These combined to be a powerful motivation for Mr Bill to try to learn everything about the world, since that's what it took to get respect.
He was a smart guy. He scored a near perfect on his SAT, and went into Harvard.
Qxe4
It sounds like the perfect qualities and personality for conquering an industry. Maybe we should be glad that he stayed out of law, or we could have ended up with a real control-freak president here.
Ah, the old human interest story. So which particular PR company is being paid to humanise the face of Gates? And why?
Reading this, this makes me understand why Gates is an asshole, not make me feel sorry for him.
Would I have been better off growing up the son of a wealthy parents? I feel like most of my life thus far has been spent catching up to where the wealthy are right out of college. Sure, it's not exactly comparable -- time has given me more experience and perspective than almost any 22 year old -- but were all those years of figuring out how to afford to do what I wanted to do really beneficial to me? I've been reasonably wise in hedging my bets and am now able to afford trying to create and sell software on my own, but did being poor give me anything worthwhile or is it just fate's way of giving me (and others like me) the shaft?
I guess ultimately Bill Gates, is just this guy, you know?
expandfairuse.org
I always think its funny when I hear or read interest pieces on a Celebrity's life. Bill Gates, according to the article synopsis, was a fiercely independent child, possibly even a brat, that was at odds with his parents. How many people in the world are there like this? And yet, its Bill that we write and read and care about because Celebrity drives and organizes social patterns....In the words of Robert M. Pirsig:
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... And so Bill Gates is a big enough celebrity to have his personal life dug into by the media. His social patterns and examples will be passed on from generation to generation. Funny, I would rather have Larry Wall be in a role that big instead....
"Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive social patterns once used to organize themselves. That gives celebrity a new importance.
None of this celebrity has any meaning in a subject-object universe. But in a value-structured universe, celebrity comes roaring to the front of reality as a huge fundamental parameter. It becomes an organizing force of the whole social level of evolution. Without this celebrity force, advanced complex human societies might be impossible. Even simple ones.
It was crazy. People going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and killing themselves just for the celebrity of it. Assassins murdering for it. Maybe the real reason nations declared war was to increase their celebrity status. You could organize an anthropology around it.
Even a policeman's uniform is a kind of celebrity device so that you will do what he says without questioning him. Without celebrity nobody would take orders from anybody and there would be no way you could get society to work.
Money and celebrity are fame and fortune, traditionally paired as twin forces in the Dynamic generation of social value. Both fame and fortune are huge Dynamic parameters that give society its shape and meaning. We have whole departments of universities, in fact, whole colleges, devoted to the study of economics, that is fortune, but what do we have that is similarly devoted to the study of fame? What exactly is the mechanism by which the cultures controls the shapes of the mirrors that produce all these different images of celebrity? Would analysis of that mirror-changing force enable the resolution of ethnic conflicts? Phaedrus didn't know..." - Lila, Chapter 20, Robert M. Pirsig.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Some of us remember when M$ was just producing crappy CP/M-80 compilers and assemblers. How crappy? It took me years to get out of the habit of writing "&array_name[0]", instead of "array_name", since C80 didn't use the latter correctly. (I understand that about version 6 of the M$-Windows "C" compiler they finally got it working; 5 didn't handle "if ((do_input) && inb())" correctly, since it would do the inb() first, at least in some circumstances).
After IBM was stupidly (as it turned out) snubbed by Digital Research, Mary Gates happened to meet an IBM exec at the club, and when he mentioned that they were looking for an operating system for little computers, she made the connection between him and Bill.
We all have her to "thank", first for bearing him, then for putting him into position to bully us.
He looks so much like his dad ^___^
spare me the details...
Why Bill Gates stays so calm on stage whenever Microsoft's product demos run into trouble: He had plenty of experience with such things, starting at an early age. Young 'Trey' managed to persuade employees of the City of Seattle to come to his parents' house for a demo of his and Paul Allen's Traf-O-Data software, but the first live demo of his system failed. So how did Bill react? He ran into the kitchen, shouting on the way, 'Mom! Mom! Come and tell them that it worked!'
Do you really think they need a PR Company to humanise BillG face? When you have THIS replacing you at the company, you will look good compared to him no matter what you have done.
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/exec/steve/
Similar thing happened to SJobs, when he got fired from the company he founded. Ask the people who were around him in 1980s, he wasn't _that_ loved. Hugely respected, admired but not liked. Of course, BillG wasn't fired, that is one difference. IMHO, if he tried to make a NeXT like revolution at MSFT, that bald guy would really, really fire/replace him somehow.
Of course the slideshow isn't viewable in Firefox.
It's a debatable point as to whether Gates ever actually grew up. He is famious for yelling "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard" at his underlings. It would expalin his total lack of a moral compass in his business dealings.
davecb5620@gmail.com
In addition to the freaking picture of MS founder(s) laying on the table next to amiga now I have the freaking picture of not well-aged father of the MS founder and the other MS founder.. now what? is this news for nerds site? sorry, no
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
"Oh, FFS. I have Aspergers and am disorganised beyond belief to the point where I have to automate payments to take care I don't end up in arrears. I had a crap father (have, but to me he's dead), but I rank in Mensa tests in the top 1% of the country. So IQ doesn't impress me much - it's EQ"
That an interesting point, some others have suggested that Gates displays the symptoms of an Aspergers sufferer.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Really don't care. He's an arrogant prick and i really don't care that he came from some privileged family that taught him early to bend the rules, cheat, lie and steal. He should be taken out back and shot instead of making him out to some 'geek hero', which is is not.
Now, a story about Woz's childhood, that would be interesting.
Ya, mod me down, i cant help it that i despise the man and doing it wont change my mind.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Trying to put a soft human side to the person who stole innovation and profits from the PC industry, who used illegal leveraging of a monopoly to build his wealth.
The IBM people saw that business people using the Apple II normally had a Z80 Softcard from Microsoft with CP/M and several Microsoft tools and applications. They decided that their machine should have this as well.
In their meeting with Bill, they were shocked to find out that CP/M belonged to a different company. Bill Gates immediately called Gary Kindall and told him he was sending some very important people to talk to him. The IBM people went to California and when things didn't work out they came back to Seattle and Bill promised to supply an OS himself.
Don't trust me on this - see what the people actually involved said about it:
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
Gladwell's latest book "Outliers" has a chapter about Bill Gates. Overall the book is about how a certain very few people are able to have outrageous success. The standard American story of this is that through hard work and determination that anything is possible. Gladwell points out that in most cases it requires a lot more than grit and determination it also requires being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time with exactly the right skills. (I know... duh. Right? But it is a good book).
For Bill Gates... he went to a wealthy private school whose Mom's organization decided to buy a computer terminal in 1968! Bill would have been one of a handful of teenagers in the world who had access to a computer in those days (and one that didn't require punchcard programming at that.) Later he and Paul Allen were able to get access to U. of Washington computers late at night. As a result they got jobs programming during high school.
I don't remember all the details, but Gates (and a similar story for Bill Joy of Sun) had lots of very unusual, very lucky situations along the way that led to him being a young very skilled programmer at a time when virtually no other people in the world would have had that level of experience (10,000 hours).
He was a smart, tenacious kid, but Microsoft wouldn't have happened if he hadn't had access to that terminal when he 13 years old.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
For another perspective on Bill's success, and a deeply interesting look at success in general, check out Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers .
Ya, mod me down, i cant help it that i despise the man and doing it wont change my mind.
Mod you down? Hardly! I wholeheartedly agree with your take on that sick twerp.
OS's were set to become huge regardless of who happened to be at the switch. There was a requirement for them, a vacuum in the world which needed filling, and so here we are. That we happened to get a power-mad creep at the front of the parade is just bad luck. (Though, in a game which is heavily biased toward psychotic jerks rising to the top, chances are if it wasn't him, it would have been somebody like him.)
-FL
He is a cut throat business man with shady practices, not a 'geek hero'.
If he was actually sitting there helping code the products, i might change my stand, but he wasn't/isn't, so he's just yet another overpaid suit
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and guess what? He's an asshole now.
This reminds me of the scene in the current "Crank 2 - High Voltage" movie where the action stops at one point and we're treated to a replay of a video of Chev Chelios as a young boy being brought on a TV show because he's such a rotter even at that age.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Really, especially here, who friggin cares?