Reddit reviews Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

For people that made their wealth from scratch, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, and didn't rely as much on luck as they did on themselves, I think they are smart (I'm assuming they didn't outright "con" their way to that position too).

Besty was born into a rich family though. She is totally not qualified in her position right now.

Edit: Gates was born in a wealthy family, but not an "ultra" wealthy family and not near as rich as he is today. His main advantage from his family was that he was sent to a private school, Lakeside, that could afford computers, and that's where he got his start in computers. That private school was certainly an advantage in getting him started with computers. At times, he also had some luck (ie. IBM thought hardware was the future so they gave away the rights of the OS to Gates). Having said that, Gates turned his startup into the Microsoft we know today. If you read about how he turned his startup into the Microsoft of the 90's in this biography, you will see that he is a pretty intelligent and hardworking guy (although some may consider him to be an asshole at the same time).

http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292

Did you? His father was a big shot lawyer, his mother was on the board of many companies and had many connections. His mother's family is well connected in the Seattle area. This is well stated throughout some of his biographies (notably HardDrive and you should probably read up on Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell to get an idea on a big part of how Gates rose to success.

Highly recommend the biography on Bill Gates called Hard Drive. It was really fascinating reading about his upbringing and experience in school that led to his fascination with software.

http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292

If memory serves this book at least had some mention of Gabe during his time at Microsoft: http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292

There was a Reddit post of it a while back I think, I can't remember if it was even this sub though.

Edit: Found it, it may or may not be useful in your paper: http://www.reddit.com/r/Gaben/comments/2cvijb/what_it_takes_to_become_gaben_xpost_rgaming/

The NT kernel was derived from VAX/VMS and it's mostly the work of Dave Cutler, an ex-Digital engineer hired by Gates to work on a new 32-bit Kernel. (http://www.microsoft.com/about/technicalrecognition/david-cutler.aspx)
If you want to get a feel of OpenVMS, telnet to jack.vistech.net. (http://jack.vistech.net/JACK.shtml)
Looks UNIX-y but has little in common.

The kernel in Windows 9x was a toy. There was no memory isolation between processes and no hardware abstraction layer (HAL). I could talk directly to your Sound Blaster from my poorly written Win32 game. If my game didn't step on someone's else's stack, it surely mishandled something in the hardware and there you have it, BSOD became pop culture. Oh yes, and i could overwrite memory in kernel space. Sorry, i just overwrote the I/O scheduler with my highscore, let's BSOD and call it a day. First OS to address this in personal computing space was OS/2, followed by Windows NT 3.1.

I highly recommend picking up a copy of "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire" (http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292) if you have an interest in OS development history, it's an epic adventure with just the right amount of technical bits thrown in to keep it very entertaining.

The Microsoft Research IPv6 stack was released after NT 4.0 shipped. Source code is publicly available and for the "historian programmer" makes for a very entertaining afternoon. (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/b92f7517-a39e-4c51-968e-079e7178807e/)

As for Firefox and its IPv6 support, my screenshot shows Firefox 2.0.0.20, which not only supports v6 but it prefers it over v4. They were just ahead of their time.

Why is there a will? Just like some watch football (i should probably say soccer, shouldn't i?) with a passion, i poke around at computing history trying to figure out where it all came from. It's my thing.

And, going a little off-track here, if anyone wonders (probably not), the "Hide file extensions" checkbox was there in NT4 and was ticked by default, just like in Windows Server 2012 R2 today.
http://i.imgur.com/XTczvv1.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bq-K8XgIAAAn3f9.png:large

Some things never change.

Hard Drive by James Wallace and Jim Erickson is really good.

Amazon Link

Wow. You haven't spent must time in business have you?

In a truly competitive free market system it is almost impossible to honestly earn a billion dolllars.

With rare exception such as in the cases of true innovation like say the google founders - earning a billion dollars requires some illegal monopolization of a market thus I wouldn't trust such a person becuase they have shown themselves to be willing to break the law or be dishonest.

For example Microsoft was of course convicted after a trial of illegal monopolization in the software market which put many other better softare innovators out of business and increased software prices for all of us for the past 3 decades as well as limited our choices. (incidently Bill Gates got the contract to provide IBM DOS becuase his mother was on the board of the United Way with The Chairman of IBM. Gates didn't own DOS at the time and after getting the contract went to an un suspecting software programmer who had written DOS and bought it from him without telling him hey had a preexisitng contract to resell it as Microsoft DOS to IBM.
according to the GREAT book ["Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire"](
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887306292?ie=UTF8&tag=reddit0e-20)

If you had spent much time in real business at the levels where big money is made you would know this.
(and that's not a criticism just a fact. I have spent a lot of time at high levels and have seen this first hand. It makes it very hard to be an honest person in big business today when others around you routinely cheat and lie.)

Another rare exception is investment advisors who by shear size of the investments they make can earn large amounts as a small percentage of the investment however in practice I have seen they usually are dishonest about the safely or expected returns of the investments they place their investors money in to get higher percentage commissions.

There are VERY few inventions or entertainers which can earn 1 billion dollars which is also an honest way to make money.

However is is possible to earn 10 or even 100 million honestly in business although it is hard because you often compete against others who cheat and most are therefore forced to cheat to to be able to remain competitive in their market. however there are enough niche markets without huge competitors where you can still build a business earning 1 to 10 million a year (making it worth 10 to 100 million at a 10% cap rate) without being rapidly squashed by cheating competitors.

I could add so many to this list, but this one is most fitting with the books you've posted.

https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292

This one is from one of the engineers who made the original Macintosh and includes information from a bit before and a bit later of Mac's story. It is a book form of this site basically (which i think has slightly more content than the book), but i find the book much easier to read than the site.

There is also another book about Microsoft's early history (until ~1992). I have read a Greek translation only so i'm not sure if it is the same, but based on Google's preview of a few pages i think it is this one. I do not have the book with me (i am in Poland and i left it in Greece) so i cannot confirm if it really this is the one i'm talking about. It is hard to find a translated book published almost two decades ago :-P

If you want a good book on early Gates/MS (Pre 1995)

Hard Drive is a great book (1993). Very inspiring.

http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292/

Buy the book Hard Drive. It goes really in depth into Gates life and subsequent business ventures. It also doesn't appear to be written by someone sucking his cock, in fact quite the opposite. Great read IMO.

It came out in 1992 I believe as well, so not far removed from some of these things.

http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292

Plus you can make pics with yourself kissing him (look at the cover ;)

Think you mean "Triumph of the Nerds" which is the documentary based on the book Accidental Empires, How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date written by Robert Cringely. A good read, IMO. (Revenge of the Nerds was a movie with Lewis, Gilbert and Booger!)
Also worth a read are: Dealers of Lightning, Xerox parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael Hiltzik; Go To by Steve Lohr; and Hard Drive, Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by Wallace & Erickson

I wish it were in PDF form. I bought it on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0887306292

54 used from 0.01, not bad pricing.

Read Hard Drive if you want a better picture about gates.

100x better than the Pirates movie.