3 ms·

AKA how Bill Gates because Bill Gates. One of the very few kids to have access to a computer at the time.

by bruceb 5y ago

adolph 5y ago
And Allen: Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen first met as teenagers in the late 1960s at Lakeside School in Seattle, when Gates was in eighth grade and Allen was in tenth grade. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/microsoft-co-founders-bill-gates-and-paul-allen-met-in-high-school.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/microsoft-co-founders-bill-g... See also Levy: "Inside Bill's Brain Calls BS on Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers Theory": Inside Bill's Brain lays the Gladwell Theorem to waste. By delving into Gates' very early life, Guggenheim reveals that, basically, Bill Gates arrived on Earth as a Martian. From the instant baby Gates joined his well-off clan, he understood there was a giant impedance mismatch between his cosmic intellect and that of the world. There's an amazing moment when he recounts the time his parents had him take a test to get into an exclusive private school for the sixth grade. He asked himself, did he want to go, figuring that if not, he would purposely blow the test. https://www.wired.com/story/inside-bills-brain-outliers/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-bills-brain-outliers/
erosenbe0 5y ago
To be fair, Gates published one and only CS paper. It was on prefix sorting and shows pretty serious mastery of discrete math for his age or any age. Perhaps the co-author -- legendary algorithms professor Papadimitriou -- honed the proofs but Gates was clearly not a one-trick programming pony. He also chased programming like a starved Tiger, doing things like looking through corporate trash bins for source listings and that sort of stuff. Not to mention that Allen was also a person of extreme intellect and Ballmer is actually a mathematician combined with a charismatic business brain and a small nuclear reactor in one.

AKA how Bill Gates because Bill Gates. One of the very few kids to have access to a computer at the time.

by bruceb 5y ago

AKA how Bill Gates because Bill Gates. One of the very few kids to have access to a computer at the time.

And Allen: Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen first met as teenagers in the late 1960s at Lakeside School in Seattle, when Gates was in eighth grade and Allen was in tenth grade. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/microsoft-co-founders-bill-gates-and-paul-allen-met-in-high-school.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/microsoft-co-founders-bill-g... See also Levy: "Inside Bill's Brain Calls BS on Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers Theory": Inside Bill's Brain lays the Gladwell Theorem to waste. By delving into Gates' very early life, Guggenheim reveals that, basically, Bill Gates arrived on Earth as a Martian. From the instant baby Gates joined his well-off clan, he understood there was a giant impedance mismatch between his cosmic intellect and that of the world. There's an amazing moment when he recounts the time his parents had him take a test to get into an exclusive private school for the sixth grade. He asked himself, did he want to go, figuring that if not, he would purposely blow the test. https://www.wired.com/story/inside-bills-brain-outliers/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-bills-brain-outliers/

erosenbe0 5y ago

To be fair, Gates published one and only CS paper. It was on prefix sorting and shows pretty serious mastery of discrete math for his age or any age. Perhaps the co-author -- legendary algorithms professor Papadimitriou -- honed the proofs but Gates was clearly not a one-trick programming pony. He also chased programming like a starved Tiger, doing things like looking through corporate trash bins for source listings and that sort of stuff. Not to mention that Allen was also a person of extreme intellect and Ballmer is actually a mathematician combined with a charismatic business brain and a small nuclear reactor in one.