Archivos para mayo, 2011

Paul Allen y Bill Gates

Les comparto un artículo que leí hace casi un mes y que había olvidado compartirlo. Este artículo muestra la historia de Microsoft y la relación de Paul Allen con Bill Gates. Algunos fragmentos que me parecieron interesantes incluyen:

La importancia de trabajar duro…

We worked till all hours, with double shifts on weekends. Bill basically stopped going to class. Monte Davidoff, a Harvard freshman studying advanced math who had joined us, overslept his one-o’clock French section. I neglected my job at Honeywell, dragging into the office at noon. I’d stay until 5:30, and then it was back to Aiken until three or so in the morning. I’d save my files, crash for five or six hours, and start over. I’d occasionally catch Bill grabbing naps at his terminal during our late-nighters. He’d be in the middle of a line of code when he’d gradually tilt forward until his nose touched the keyboard. After dozing for an hour or two, he’d open his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume precisely where he’d left off—a prodigious feat of concentration.

La importancia del orgullo

“You know, Bill, when you get to Harvard, there are going to be some people a lot better in math than you are.” “No way,” he said. “There’s no way!” And I said, “Wait and see.” I was O.K. with being a generalist. For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester, and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his Ph.D. at 16.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to 30 hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B.

A veces es útil ser el abogado del Diablo.

Each time I brought an idea to Bill, he would pop my balloon. “That would take a bunch of people and a lot of money,” he’d say. Or “That sounds really complicated. We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he’d remind me. “What we know is software.” And he was right.  A few of us cringed at the way he’d demean people and force them to defend their positions. If what he heard displeased him, he’d shake his head and say sarcastically, “Oh, I suppose that means we’ll lose the contract, and then what?” When someone ran late on a job, he had a stock response: “I could code that in a weekend!”  The irony was that Bill liked it when someone pushed back and drilled down with him to get to the best solution. He wouldn’t pull rank to end an argument. He wanted you to overcome his skepticism, and he respected those who did.

Los detalles son importantes..

As I got ready to go to Albuquerque, Bill began to worry. What if I’d screwed up one of the numbers used to represent the 8080 instructions in the macro assembler? Our BASIC had tested out fine on my simulator on the PDP-10, but we had no sure evidence that the simulator itself was flawless. A single character out of place might halt the program cold when it ran on the real chip. The night before my departure, after I knocked off for a few hours of sleep, Bill stayed up with the 8080 manual and triple-checked my macros. He was bleary-eyed the next morning when I stopped by en route to Logan Airport to pick up the fresh paper tape he’d punched out. The byte codes were correct.

El artículo completo se encuentra aquí.