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Re: [News] [Rival] On the Unethical Oil Industry and Microsoft Corporation

In article <Fkggj.47054$vt2.6409@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 Linonut <linonut@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> * DFS fired off this tart reply:
> 
> > Jerry McBride wrote:
> >> Put any of them into a real world situation... like a
> >> real 9 to 5 job and they would fail miserably.
> >
> > Asking them to work 9 to 5 would be an insult.  Gates works much more than 
> > that - or at least he used to.
> 
> Indeed. I read once where he was found on the floor, asleep, mumbling
> about some problem he'd been working on.
> 
> He used to be a real hacker.

Sounds like an incident recounted in that unauthorized biography that 
those Seattle newspaper reporters wrote about him in the late '80s or 
early '90s.  It was late in the IBM PC project, and although Gates no 
longer had time to write code, he had printouts of everything his 
employees were writing for IBM, and would go over them, and mark bugs, 
and make notes on how they could make the code more efficient, and 
things like that.

Something was supposed to be delivered to an IBM guy Monday, who was 
going to fly back to IBM with it, but they weren't done.  It was going 
to be done that night, so Gates told him to delay and pick it up Tuesday 
morning.  He got the listings that night, and spent all night going over 
them to find bugs and suggest changes.  When they got there in the 
morning, he was on the floor, asleep, with marked listings all over the 
floor.

The notion that any of these guys could not handle 9 to 5 is ridiculous.  
They all handled 9 to 5, or much worse, to get to where they are today.

-- 
--Tim Smith

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