Musicmystery
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ORIGINAL: thompsonx
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ORIGINAL: Moonhead
quote:
ORIGINAL: thompsonx
Bill gates is poorly educated and he is one of the ten richest men in the world.
Not quite. He dropped out of law school to concentrate on his software company, but he'd had a rather expensive education prior to that, as the fact that he dropped out of university implies.
According to bill gates he dropped out of harvard college,not law school, after the first semester of his junior year.
How does not finishing college make one "poorly educated"? Is there no benefit to the earlier years until one hits sheepskin? Does reading, networking, experience count as education?
Truth is, he was exceedingly well educated about computers from the earliest days. He didn't spring from Zeus' head in full armor.
At 13 Gates enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school.[20] When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students.[21] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he said, "There was just something neat about the machine."[22] After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[23]
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via Teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success."[22] At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.[24] In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.[25]
Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT[26] and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973.[27] While at Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer, who later succeeded Gates as CEO of Microsoft.
In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems[28] presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years;[28][29] its successor is faster by only one percent.[28] His solution was later formalized in a published paper in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.[30]
Gates did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard[31] and spent a lot of time using the school's computers. Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen, and he joined him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974.[32] The following year saw the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company.[33] He had talked this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a company.[31]
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.[34] In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS,[35] and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November 1975. They named their partnership "Micro-Soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque.[35] Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico.[35] Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
This myth of the ignorant entrepreneur is just that--a myth. Readily granted, formal education is not the end-all golden path to success. But people who don't strictly follow its prescriptions are actively engaged in education elsewhere.
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