Bill Gates at Harvard (2013)

news.harvard.edu

27 points·igonvalue··7 comments

Christos Papadimitriou mentioned Bill Gates in this interview: http://awards.acm.org/info/papadimitriou_4558987.cfm.

Quote: "I remember thinking: "Such a brilliant kid. What a waste.""

I wonder what would happen if Gates went on to become an academic while Papadimitriou an entrepreneur. Maybe in some parallel universe.

I'm willing to say the same thing about Richard Stallman (replace entrepreneur with activist, of course).

Is Harvard proud of its "billionaire dropouts"? For anyone less successful I would think there would be some uneasiness in showcasing someone who never earned a degree. I mean when someone drops out it obviously means that the conventional university path failed them. This seems like a weird message to put in a school magazine. I guess Harvard can say that they at least helped Bill Gates on his path to founding Microsoft but they certainly can't claim them as one of their own?

The thing is, the article makes it clear that the computer resources and social connections Gates had at Harvard were key to his success.

I wonder if the author thought the same thing I did looking at Bill Gates' picture. Oh, look, Bill Gates is in the original Facebook.

and showing a contrast of fate/luck, the man in the picture beside Bill Gates, Lawrence Gaynor, died from cancer when he 40.

"The goal was to get the program into less than the 4K of memory that an enhanced Altair would have, so there would be a little room left over for the consumer to use. (A 16GB smartphone has four million times that memory.) "

facepalm

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