Stephen Manes > Quotes

“ i want to be a singer”
― stephen manes, Chocolate-Covered Ants

“And the biggest software problem of all was an idea humanist computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum had treated skeptically back in 1974: “One would have to be astonished,” he wrote, “if Lord Acton’s observation that power corrupts were not to apply in an environment in which omnipotence is so easily achievable. It does apply. And the corruption evoked by the computer programmer’s omnipotence manifests itself in a form that is instructive in a domain far larger than the immediate environment of the computer.” Meaning? “The compulsive programmer is convinced that life is nothing but a program running on an enormous computer, and that therefore every aspect of life can ultimately be explained in programming terms.”
― Stephen Manes, Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America

“Bill Gates’s story was never rags to riches, a Harvard friend once remarked, but riches to riches—though the initial affluence, embellished to include such fictions as a million-dollar trust fund, was now utterly insignificant.”
― Stephen Manes, Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America

“And commercialize was the word: Whereas much early software had been developed for the sheer challenge and shared like some favorite toy, the Gates/Allen edition of BASIC—the first personal computer language—was from the outset a business proposition, something people were supposed to pay for. That idea did not sit well with the pioneer hobbyists whose lame little machines needed BASIC to become something more than high-tech doorstops.”
― Stephen Manes, Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America

“Never mind that young Bill had a less-than-spotless past when it came to computer freebieism, had been chastised for manipulating accounts on a time-sharing system as an eighth grader and investigated by Harvard University for running up hour upon hour of academic computer time while developing that very same for-profit BASIC.”
― Stephen Manes, Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America

“And commercialize was the word: Whereas much early software had been developed for the sheer challenge and shared like some favorite toy, the Gates/Allen edition of BASIC—the first personal computer language—was from the outset a business proposition, something people were supposed to pay for.”
― Stephen Manes, Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America

“On the cover of Business Month, Gates’s head would be satirically airbrushed onto a weight lifter’s torso above the legend “The Silicon Bully: How Long Can Bill Gates Kick Sand in the Face of the Computer Industry?”
― Stephen Manes, Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America