Bill Gates Taking Pre-Orders For 'Source Code', a Memoir of His Early Years (gatesnotes.com) 72
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:
If you devoured the Childhood of Famous Americans book series as a kid and are ready for a longer read, Bill Gates has a book for you.
"I'm excited to announce my new book, Source Code, which will be published next February," Gates wrote Tuesday in a GatesNotes blog post. "It's a memoir about my early years, from childhood through my decision to leave college and start Microsoft with Paul Allen. I write about the relationships, lessons, and experiences that laid the foundation for everything in my life that followed." GeekWire explains the timing of the book release is notable: January 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the Popular Electronics magazine issue that featured the early Altair 8800 personal computer, which inspired Gates and Allen to start the company.
Proceeds from book sales will be donated to the nonprofit United Way Worldwide, in recognition of Gates' late mother Mary's longtime work as a volunteer and board member with the organization.
"Hey, this thing is happening without us," Allen famously said to Bill Gates (who had just turned 19).
When Gates finished reading the Popular Electronics article, "he realized that Allen was right," according to one biographer. "For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business."
"I'm excited to announce my new book, Source Code, which will be published next February," Gates wrote Tuesday in a GatesNotes blog post. "It's a memoir about my early years, from childhood through my decision to leave college and start Microsoft with Paul Allen. I write about the relationships, lessons, and experiences that laid the foundation for everything in my life that followed." GeekWire explains the timing of the book release is notable: January 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the Popular Electronics magazine issue that featured the early Altair 8800 personal computer, which inspired Gates and Allen to start the company.
Proceeds from book sales will be donated to the nonprofit United Way Worldwide, in recognition of Gates' late mother Mary's longtime work as a volunteer and board member with the organization.
"Hey, this thing is happening without us," Allen famously said to Bill Gates (who had just turned 19).
When Gates finished reading the Popular Electronics article, "he realized that Allen was right," according to one biographer. "For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business."
The next Bill Gates will not read this book (Score:4)
Elon Musk's biographer once said that the first thing you should know about Musk is that "he would never waste his time reading a book like this."
Gates and Musk were successful because they did stuff, not because they read about successful people from half a century ago.
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I think this one is intended for entertainment purposes.
Cool. I'll wait for the free HTML or PDF version. I've paid "the Microsoft tax [linfo.org] too many times already.
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Fell into the trap of every writer ever... you may not pay for it (Libraries exist.. read it for free FFS..), but you will read it.
Kinda funny people think this is some sort of "got yah sucka!".... LOL
Re:The next Bill Gates will not read this book (Score:5, Funny)
When J.P. Getty was asked the secrets of his success, his reply was:
1. Rise early
2. Work hard
3. Strike oil
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Re: The next Bill Gates will not read this book (Score:3, Informative)
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The parent post might refer to Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (some of editions published were published under the name of Memoir). Though published posthumously, it is of his hand and "addressed to his son". It is extremely presumptuous to write one's autobiography and even more to call it Memoir. Emperors such as Caesar and Napoleon have assessed their exceptional destiny called for letting a written trace of their memories. Gates probably shares having an exceptional destiny and a lasting influence on
How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates (Score:5, Interesting)
https://philip.greenspun.com/b... [greenspun.com]
"Lesson 1: Choose Your Grandparents Carefully
William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates
In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."
Dumpster diving to read other people's source code from discarded printouts helped too:
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
"In high school, Gates and Allen honed their programming skills on a DEC minicomputer owned by a local company, C-Cubed. But as students, they didn't have access to as much information as the company's employees, which frustrated them. So at night, Allen would boost the smaller Gates up to the top of the company's dumpsters, where he'd look for interesting stuff. Once, they found a printout of the TOPS-10 source code, and it unlocked a lot of secrets."
Writing a hypocritical "open letter to hobbyists" given that wealth and given reading other's source code helped too:
"Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists"
https://www.opnlttr.com/letter... [opnlttr.com]
"As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft."
This from someone who could have written free software for the rest of his life based on hist trust fund.
Wondering if those factoids will be in the autobiography?
If you want a real software hero, as one example, look to Gary Kildall, a real hands-on software developer and toolmaker, who created CP/M -- where QDOS (a rough clone of CP/M with similar APIs by someone else) was then bought by Gate/Microsoft and relicensed to IBM (with IBM's lawyers potentially wanting to be one-step removed from a potential legal minefield compared to licensing QDOS directly).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
"Was Microsoft's Empire Built on Stolen Code? We May Never Know"
https://www.wired.com/2012/08/... [wired.com]
"A forensic computing researcher may have settled one of tech's longest standing controversies: whether the original version of Microsoft's seminal MS-DOS operating system contained code copied from an older OS called known as CP/M. But now we have another controversy: the researcher has close ties to Microsoft."
https://computerhistory.org/bl... [computerhistory.org]
"Paterson denied any wrongdoing. "I told him [Kildall] I didn't copy anything. I just took his printed documentation and did something that did the same thing.""
I also met someone at IBM Research (circa 1999) who had developed a version of Forth (before the IBM PC) which he as still using to run an editor (among other things) -- but the IBM PC division in Boca Raton, Florida did not want to use it for the IBM PC OS because of interdepartmental issues at IBM. If not for that internal IBM politics, we might have had a (free) Forth revolution underlying all our computing. Sigh... See also OpenBoot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Artificial scarcity is scarcity of items despite the technology for production or the sufficient capacity for sharing. The most common causes are monopoly pricing structures, such as those enabled by laws that restrict competition or by high fixed costs in a particular marketplace. The inefficiency associated with artificial scarcity is formally known as a deadweight loss."
And also: ...
"Billionaires Are a Policy Failure That Must Be Addressed Opinion"
https://www.newsweek.com/billi... [newsweek.com]
"We should be angry that billionaires like Bezos can spend their money on superyachts while millions needlessly suffer and die, and we should be angry that billionaires like Charles Koch can single-handedly bankroll the campaigns of elected officials. But our real outrage should be directed at the fact that we as a society let people like them get so insanely rich in the first place, and it's time that we do something about it.
Forty years of misguided tax policy have left us with a status quo where it is virtually impossible for billionaires to do anything but get richer. The only direct approaches left to us to fix the mess of excessive wealth are a wealth tax on the very richest Americans and a stronger estate tax that effectively curtails dynastic wealth. We should also enact policies that strengthen the overall position of working Americans like paying living wages, strengthening and protecting unions, bolstering social safety nets, sharing stock ownership of companies with workers, reforming executive compensation packages and more.
I believe that people who are hardworking, innovative and successful should be handsomely rewarded. But humility demands one recognize success derives from many factors beyond the individual, including luck."
Windows is a DEC operating system in reality (Score:2)
We all knew that. Those of us who cut our teeth on DEC hardware and OS's (TOPS-10, RT-11) prefer it to (cough) Linux (cough).
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Why is architectural similarity sufficient to cause you to prefer it to a more performant and stable alternative which is very well understood?
A Unix always required more resources (Score:2)
In grad school, I had the keys to a room with a PDP-11 running RT-11 to carry out my research project.
My advisor, who had been a Bell Labs bigwig tells me, "I understand this thing called 'Unix' is really good. Look into putting it on the PDF-11."
I looked into it, and the single "hard drive" of whatever model number was insufficient; Unix needed dual the next higher model number. I passed this information "up the chain" and the reply was, "Thanks for checking on this." I mean, what professor wants t
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I'm not familiar with what the Unix reqs were like for PDP nor what the PDP hardware was like, as I came in with the next generation. But NT is anything but svelte today, so I'm not sure what the modern relevance of that story might be.
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Maybe the services and applications built on Window NT are not "svelte" but the Windows NT Executive (kernel) is pretty damn good.
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From what I recall, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer rented a ratty building as an early office and lived in it for several months before they had enough money to rent apartments to live in.
Maybe his granddad had money, but you assume a lot to act like he had a lot of money personally he could just throw around. He got rich by hard work and smarts...not sniping at successful people online.
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I don't think anyone here can say that Bill Gates is not a smart man who was important to a very successful company. However history can not be taken into account, it's not just about money in place, it about hereditary wealth and oppurtunities. The rich grandad meant his children could be well educated and thus...
His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors of First Interstate BancSystem and United Way of America.
It all flows downhill. Maybe Gates didn't have money
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That's not my point, you try again lol
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You claimed he had an unfair advantage due to his rich boy education, which he didn't get and was not the source of his know-how.
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What do you mean, I spelled out that being in the upper class of society creates oppurtunities and choices most people will never have and his complete sense of economic security also contributed to his, let's call it spirit of entrepreneuership. you just went back to "well, money" and did not address any of that.
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Yep, and you explicitly said that for Gates, that meant going to Harvard.
And I explained that's not the case. He gained his knowledge entirely Computer Club during high school and his own interest and personal endeavors during that time. Harvard had nothing to do with it.
People with you hate people who are successful because either you were given all the same advantages and could not succeed, or you didn't have the same advantages but you lack initiative and would rather snipe at others who have it.
Pathet
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Again, let me break this down for you since you just latched onto the word "Harvard" and just strawmanned me from there.
Harvard considered like a top 10 university in the world, especially in 1973 if you even were in the running to attend meant you are already well ahead of everybody else, and why shouldn't he? A guy with that background should succeed and considering he did score like an almost 1600 obvious he earned a ticket there.
But just the same plenty of good students don't get the oppurtunity either
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How "should" he magically succeed without actually learning useful at Harvard? I keep telling you his computer knowledge came from not Harvard. Not Harvard. Not.
What evidence do you have that if he'd taken 3 semesters at some other school, he'd have failed and Microsoft would never have gotten off the ground?
And what evidence do you have he couldn't have gotten a scholarship?
Why are you so obsessed with tearing him down with such weak arguments?
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And I am not saying his computer knowlege came from Harvard but the mere fact of attending means you have access to business and knowledge connections most people don't, how many more times can I explain this. Plenty of people with computer knowledge aren't Bill Gates, theres more to it.
What evidence do you have that if he'd taken 3 semesters at some other school, he'd have failed and Microsoft would never have gotten off the ground?
Well defacto he wouldn't have met Ballmer so thats one thing, just like Gates and Paul Allen met at a private prep school, a prep school that today is $40k a year. Not exactly common man stuff here. Time in fact moves forw
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Just to wrap this up, you can admire what people do while at the same acknowledging that they were given exceptional oppurtunities and circumstances for success. I really like The Strokes music but they are in fact a bunch of rich kids who met at like a Swiss boarding school, Julian Casablancas is son to some sort ofNew York fashion agnate, he was like Met Galas at a child, Albert Hammond Jr. is son to an already very accomplished popular musician. They're still good songwriters and quite talented. These
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What "business and knowledge connections" did he have that no one could have had unless they attended Harvard? This is the silliest leftist dogma I think I've ever heard!
Do you mean the various stores he and Ballmer were constantly visiting and calling and begging to do business with him? The various tiny computer makers they spent all day calling and hustling to sell their BASIC interpreter to just to survive?
Do you honestly think he met all these people at Harvard? If so, it's amazing anyone in this co
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you have access to business and knowledge connections most people don't
How many times do I have to explain that that's not how he built Microsoft? That he literally had to go out and hustle and build and literally beg people to bundle his software?
I explained this in detail, but you refuse to read it.
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Fudge. Messed up the formatting! Here's one more try:
you have access to business and knowledge connections most people don't
How many times do I have to explain that that's not how he built Microsoft? That he literally had to go out and hustle and build and literally beg people to bundle his software?
I explained this in detail, but you refuse to read it.
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Gates and Musk were successful because they did stuff, not because they read about successful people from half a century ago.
Clearly you don't know how successful people are about reading. Almost to a one they will tell you of some book, or books, they read when they were young which helped them on their path to success. Many (most?) still have yearly reading lists of books.
That said, it is difficult to believe Must would read a book. Like his friend the convicted felon, he either can't stay focused long
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Elon was lucky early on. He didn’t invent paypal but bought in and cashed out during the dot com boom. Gates was at least writing code and made the smart move to license and not simply sell.
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Alternate Titles (Score:5, Funny)
"How I Gave Birth to the Anti-Christ"
"A Pile of Shit that Would Plunge Wyoming into Shadow"
"Skeletons Watching Progress Bars"
"The Man Who Could Ruin a First Kiss"
"I Almost Destroyed the Internet All By Myself"
Re:Alternate Titles (Score:4)
"Diary of a Wimpy Kid". Oh, wait, that one's taken.
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Gates did subsequently “welcome” Netscape onto the Internet. After failing to get an exclusive license from the NCSA, they licensed a browser from Spyglass, renamed it “Internet Explorer” and promised to pay them for each copy sold. MS then “gave away” Internet Explorer and Spyglass went bankrupt.
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He bought it. And only because there was no time to write one. Which he could have.
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Microsoft never has done, though. They went from something based on Mosaic to something based on Chrome. They've got whatever layout engine(s) Word is based on, and they've got Publisher, as you say surely they could write their own... So why haven't they? Answer, they want it to work.
Re: Road Ahead failed to mention the Internet! (Score:3)
They clearly don't, because all of their products are shit and getting shittier.
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Windows 11 still sucks, but Microsoft still made Windows 10, which is amazing and still blows the sock off any desktop OS the Linux community has produced.
After vowing to abandon Windows, I'm writing this on Linux. I first tried Ubuntu and the level of buginess and kludginess was too just much to be usable. But I settled on Linux Mint, which has a Start Menu that's utterly useless and a thousand design decisions I think only a toddler (or programmer) would have made. Things take 20 more clicks to get
Wind
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Office is still the best office suite around, by a wide margin
Microsoft seems to be putting in substantial work to make it worse. I truly hate the word bubble that pops up when I open a read only document.
And when it comes to OS stability, Windows is more stable, too.
HaHAHaHAHahhaHahaHahAHA
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What read only message is that?
Imbecilic laugh.
Well, I'm doing my best to move to Linux this week. It's a fucking slog. The UIs are insanely non-discoverable and unintuitive, in an absolutely unforgivable way. Like they were written by the same toddlers who designed GIMP.
And every single thing is so GODDAMNED buggy because no one ever tests anything and there are a thousand distros with no standards. And this is Ubuntu!
It's a damned good thing Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot so hard on telemetry and AI, or I w
Re: Road Ahead failed to mention the Internet! (Score:2)
When I open a read only document at work, where I am forced to use office, a little square text bubble appears in the upper right to tell me it is read only. I can't do anything with the document until I clear it by clicking it. What I want to do is hit ^F to find a string, what I have to do is click first.
As for the rest of your comment, you claimed that Linux was less stable than Windows, then you moved the goalposts to less discoverable. But this is a lot of horse shit as well, because everything you thi
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Oh, Linux is less stable, I just got a little diverted. I was just trying to add several spacers to my task bar (panel) in Cinnamon and the entire system hung. Not even a BSOD to tell me it was hung!
That's just one of countless bugs I constantly encounter in Linux. I can sort of get around them by lowering my expectations or just accepting that functionality isn't gonna work.
Your Read-only inconvenience is the silliest little thing I've ever heard. Life must be hella easy if that inconveniences you enou
Nope (Score:3)
no thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
Source code? (Score:2)
Yeah, I've read about what a great coder Bill Gates was.
https://folklore.org/Donkey.ht... [folklore.org]
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Yeah, I've read about what a great coder Bill Gates was.
https://folklore.org/Donkey.ht... [folklore.org]
In his book "Barbarians led by Bill Gates", Marlin Eller recounts a story where he found some very questionable code in DOS and asked Bill Gates "which brain-dead hack wrote this shit" - I'm paraphrasing a bit - only to be told later that the brain-dead hack was BillG himself
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it was something called the "flood-fill algorithm"
The 'Source Code' of Bill Gates memory (Score:5, Informative)
“Lakeside now managed to obtain on loan a DEC PDP-8/L computer. Gates obtained the source code for a version of BASIC from DECUS [slashdot.org], a DEC user's group.”
Joint development Agreement Between International business Machines corporation And Microsoft corporation [edge-op.org]
Source Code? (Score:3)
Closed source, book comes with a large padlock holding it closed.
I attended Gates' talk at the 1976 First World Altair Computer Convention.
Is he gonna mention how he stole the code (Score:2)
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Should be a short book (Score:3)
Re:Should be a short book (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah monopolies were supposed to be illegal, but a bunch of assholes got monopolies anyways, and the people in charge of enforcement looked the other way. And of course the monopoly killed off competition, making it illegal was supposed to stop that. Now imagine if someone killed off your family member, pet dog, or pet project, then when you complain, someone laughs at you and calls you a cunt.
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Sure sure, hope it happens to you then.
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Now imagine if someone killed off your family member, pet dog, or pet project, then when you complain, someone laughs at you and calls you a cunt.
Sounds like a police call in America.
A memoir, eh? (Score:2)
Paul Alen's cancer (Score:3)
"Despicable Me, memoir of a tyrant" (Score:2)
It's a short book... (Score:1)
"Hi. I stole DOS. The End."
Bill Gates ... (Score:1)
should burn in Hell.
Other peoples source code (Score:2)
"How I wrote DOS" (Score:2)
Oh, wait...
One should note that success doesn't come... (Score:2)
... from being "good" at something. Usually it comes from being not the worst at something, but having the freedom to take risks. That's one of the reason why children of millionaires will become rich. They simply never have to fear risks as they have enough resources to try out a few business ideas until they stumble onto one that works for them.