GATES

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic!!
Review: An excellent read!! That's all I can say about it. If you've been around computers since 1977, as I have, you'll love this book. Get it!!

Rating:
Summary: So THAT'S how to make a billion dollars!
Review: Great reading for all propeller-heads. Excellent history of the ultimate "right place at the right time" scenario. I give it three thumbs up....

Rating:
Summary: The only reasonably accurate Microsoft history.
Review: Having read most of the "histories" of Microsoft and Bill Gates and having been around the PC industry for a couple of decades, this was the only one of the books that triggered more "I remember that" reactions than "Wait a minute, that wasn't what happened" reactions.

Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Account of The Early Gates
Review: I am on my fourth copy of this book, my favorite among six accounts of Bill Gates and Microsoft. When confronted by young professionals who know only today's politically correct and somewhat unfavorable characterization of Microsoft's founder, I press this book upon them and urge them to dig a bit deeper into this fascinating personality.

Other newer books of course are more complete in chronicling the growth of Microsoft, but none covers Gates' boyhood and early Microsoft years so well. You do not know Gates or Microsoft unless you know what both were like during the first years of Microsoft's existence in Albuquerque from 1975 until the relocation to the Seattle area in late 1978.

After reading this book I felt I understood the essential Bill Gates. He never is going to quite grow up, and he is always going to be a bit of a mystery to those who did not become forever fascinated with computers by age thirteen.

If you are not a Gates fan now, you may like Bill Gates (privileged son of accomplished but non-technical parents, congressional page, avid water skier, college poker player) a bit more after reading this. If you are an aging hacker like me, you will smile many times at the accounts of Bill's early fascination with a timesharing computer terminal and his amazing success following on Microsoft's original products, adaptations of the Basic computer language for microcomputers beginning with the Altair.

I guess you will have to be a techie to love this book as much as I do, but it is at least essential reading for all students of the history of computer technology. Check the index and almost all of the early pioneers are there, from Altair's Roberts to Xerox's Metcalfe. And the photos are great!

Rating:
Summary: Great history of PC computing
Review: I bought this book expecting to skim through it to find out a little more about what Bill Gates was like. But it's a wonderfully readable history of the growth of PC's, from the early days when the best a school kid (Bill himself) could do was to try to get access to a teletype time-share system, on through the first home "computers" that amounted to little more than a bunch of switches and LEDs (no keyboard or monitor), to IBM coming out with the PC and Microsoft's amazing good fortune at supplying the OS (great story! Bill just cared about programming languages, mostly BASIC, and saw the DOS manuever mostly just as a way to ensure that BASIC would run on the new IBM machine!), on thru the OS/2 vs. Windows battles.

It even has a lot of inside detail on the development of the Apple Macintosh. I recently read "Accidental Empires" (the basis for the TV documentary "Triumph of the Nerds"), and found Gates to be a far better and more readable history of the PC's startup.

The book is packed with interviews and amusing or interesting anecdotes. It's well written and well edited. One drawback for some people will be that it hasn't been updated since 1995, but for the two main things that have happened since then - the anti-trust suit against Microsoft and the rise of the Internet - there are plenty of other sources.

Rating:
Summary: Best Gates Biography Around
Review: I first read "Gates" back in 1993. Many books about Bill Gates have been written since. But "Gates" by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews is still by far the best book about Bill Gates.

Rating:
Summary: Still Best Gates Biography Around
Review: I first read "Gates" back in 1993. Many books about Bill Gates have been written since. But "Gates" by Stephen Manes and
Paul Andrews is still by far the best book about Bill Gates.

Rating:
Summary: Access and Excel is not user friendly like Paradox & 123.
Review: I read what is on this website today because I had become frustrated with trying to copy the excel worksheet to access.

I never had this problem with Paradox 4.0 and Lotus 123 5.0. The files are imported more readily without trying to format the cells.

I tried it all. I tried the special paste. I tried importing and I tried linking files. I tried pasting one row at a time.

I have wasted fours hours today and I still have not been able to combine these files. If you know Bill Gates would you see that he gets this message.

Thank you!

Rating:
Summary: A Detailed History in the Making of a Monoply...
Review: I won't get wordy here but I read this book twice and enjoyed it both times. It goes into the life of Bill Gates; his thought process, his work ethics, his childhood and how Microsoft established it's dominance. It's a good read even though it's over 500 pages. I highly recommend this book along with the book "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire". This is the way it really happened. Not the way the movie "Pirates of SV" incorrectly portrayed it.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Read
Review: The book was well written, informative and unbiased. However, it had too many characters and too many jumps across the space time continuum. This is a good primer to Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System.