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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."
This is kind of tabloid territory here, but I am reminded of numerous accounts of "Bill Rage" in MS meetings. If you wanted to pitch an idea, you'd better be able to take on serious verbal abuse, sometimes simply because he didn't like the "name of one of the features" or because he didn't like some other minute aspect.
There have been so many reports of this over the years that you could really see a pattern forming around his behavior, and people around him had to "adapt" to his eccentricities.
For the most part, however, these outbursts didn't occur outside of closed doors. You don't see any videos on youtube with gates losing it in front of a camera.
(not even in the pie incident, really)
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
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.