Bill Gates Quotes
1003 Bill Gates Quotes
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I’ve learned that success depends on knowing what works and bringing resources to the problem.
Bill Gates
My success, part of it certainly, is because I have focused on a few things.
Bill Gates
When I was a kid science was very interesting because all those moon shots were going off. We could learn about liquid oxygen and escape velocity. Now most of the space program has become so commonplace that it doesn’t inspire a thirst for knowledge the way it once did.
Bill Gates
I can still remember all my lines in a high school play, Black Comedy. I was so afraid that I’d forget the lines that I just burned them into my head.
Bill Gates
[On him being a boy scout] An environment that encouraged learning and curiosity.
Bill Gates
Then I went to private school, and there was no position called the clown. I applied for it, but either they didn’t like my brand of humor or humor wasn’t in that season. In fact, I didn’t have clear positioning for a couple of years. I was trying the no-effort-makes-a-cool-guy routine. When I did start trying, people said, ‘Oh, we thought he was stupid! Better reassess.’
Bill Gates
I don’t jump spontaneously the way I used to, in the early years of the company… or even in a meeting… Now the jumping is not that common.
Bill Gates
[At age 13 using the first computer (dub terminal) at school] The notion was that, of course, the teachers would figure out this computer thing and then teach it to the students. But that didn’t happen. It was the other way around. There was a group of students who kind of went nuts.
Bill Gates
To look book now and think – geez, how did I get addicted to something like that? It’s hard to understand. They didn’t get a special phone line. We shared a phone line with the business office. So we were always competing to try to get on the thing and staying in late at night. The janitors were always kicking us out. It wasn’t a computer. We had to dial out to the computer. Computers were so expensive that you could only time-share the computer. The GE computer we were connected to cost $4 million.
Bill Gates
Running your program is the absolute test. You write a program, try it, and either it works or it doesn’t.
Bill Gates
When I was a teenager, getting a computer to crash was a big deal. It was a way to learn.
Bill Gates
We were fortunate to be authorized to ‘hack’ the system, but back then even unauthorized hacking caused minimal problems.
Bill Gates
Paul [Allen] would hoist me up on the garbage cans and I’d get the [programmer’s] notes out with the coffee grounds on them and study the operating system.
Bill Gates
I swore off computers for about a year and a half – the end of the ninth grade and all of the tenth. I tried to be normal, the best I could.
Bill Gates
I was a hard-core technoid.
Bill Gates
The greatest scam we discovered was that by getting the job doing high school scheduling, we could decide exactly what boys and girls were in our classes, and that was an incredible reward. It really motivated us to learn how to write interesting software.
Bill Gates
When we were teenagers, Paul Allen taught me a lot about computer hardware and encouraged me to believe in – and bet on – the microprocessor. I was lucky enough, at a young age, to discover something that I loved and that fascinated me – and still fascinates me. And I was lucky to have parents who motivated and encouraged me.
Bill Gates
[Before computers on choosing whether to become a lawyer or a scientist] I couldn’t decide which. My dad was a lawyer, but scientists seemed to have more interesting jobs than lawyers did.
Bill Gates
In fact we had been very frustrated because we’d been calling up people like IBM and Digital and saying ‘Would you like our compiler or would you like our editor?’ and they said ‘No, we do that stuff ourselves and you guys are just high school kids anyway. Why do you keep calling us up with these things?’
Bill Gates
[On being asked by TRW to come to Oregon for job interviews] No one knew we were just in the ninth and tenth grades.
Bill Gates
I have an image in my head of this person named Norton that I met at TRW. He always showed me when I wasn’t doing super well. So if I’m sloppy or lazy, I always imagine that he’s going to walk up, look at the program, and tell me, ‘Look, here’s a better way to do that.’
Bill Gates
[On Steve Ballmer] He was the opposite of me. I didn’t go to classes much, wasn’t involved in campus activities. Steve was involved in everything, knew everyone. Steve was general manager of the football team, head of the lit[erary] magazine, ad manager of the Crimson [newspaper]. He got me to join the Fox Club, a men’s club where you put on tuxedos, smoke cigars, drink too much, stand up on chairs and tell stories, play pool. Very old school.
Bill Gates
[On the difficulty of choosing between the many options of what he wanted to do with his life] Everything seemed so attractive, and when you had to pick a specific one you had to say no to all the others. I’d think well, if I went to that law firm some partner might not like me, and they might assign me to these crummy cases, and I’d think well, God that could really be crummy.
Bill Gates
Sitting in my room being a philosophical depressed guy, trying to figure out what I was doing with my life.
Bill Gates
[On Bill and Steve Ballmer taking a graduate economic theory course together] We fell so far behind that, during what was called ‘reading period,’ we had to work all night to try and figure out what the heck was going on and we kept thinking that we had a big advantage because we were math students. We understood math and these poor economic guys, they didn’t really understand math at all. So we thought we must have a big advantage, but whenever we took the practice quizzes, we weren’t doing too well. We just worked and worked and really – Steve [Ballmer] and I – that was a key part of getting to be close friends.
Bill Gates
It concerns me to hear young people say they don’t want to go to college because I didn’t graduate. For one thing, I got a pretty good education even though I didn’t stay long enough to get my degree. For another, the world is getting more competitive, specialized and complex each year, making a college education as critical today as a high school education was at one time.
Bill Gates
I loved my years at college, and in many respects, I regretted leaving. I did it only because I had an idea – founding the first microcomputer software company – that couldn’t wait.
Bill Gates
Paul [Allen] kept saying, ‘Let’s start a company. Let’s do it.
Bill Gates
[On seeing an article in January 1975 about the Altair 8080 which had no software] We realized that the revolution might happen without us. After we saw that article, there was no question where our life would focus.
Bill Gates
[On the Altair 8080] It was actually a kind of a kit for $360, and you had to put it together. And even once you did that, it really didn’t do much for you, but just the challenge of making it work and sort of trying to figure out what it could and couldn’t do made it very popular.
Bill Gates
[On the Altair 8080] MITS didn’t understand the importance of it. Nobody did. But we knew that people in schools everywhere would have these computers.
Bill Gates
The PC is the mainstream, the mainstream of all computing. It’s fair to say that it’s become really the tool of the information age.
Bill Gates
We just had this book that described the machine. If we had read the book wrong, or the book was wrong, we were hosed.
Bill Gates
It wasn’t a question of whether I could write the program, but rather a question of whether I could squeeze it into 4K and make it super fast.
Bill Gates
[On the operating system for the Altair] It was the coolest program I ever wrote.
Bill Gates
My parents weren’t all that excited about their son announcing he was dropping out of a fine university to start a business in something almost nobody had heard of called ‘microcomputers.’ But they were always very supportive.
Bill Gates
I can visualize the source code to the version of BASIC that I wrote for the first microcomputer, back in 1975. That was the programming code that got Microsoft started, so maybe it’s no surprise that I can still see every detail of the first page, the second page, the third page – as if they were in front of me.
Bill Gates
[On BASIC for the 8080 being his favorite software program that he has written] Because of the effect it’s had, and because of how appropriate it was a the time, and because we managed to keep it so small.
Bill Gates
I have a soft spot in my heart for BASIC. It was Microsoft’s first product, written in my college dorm room.
Bill Gates
[On MITS not making the right efforts to sell their BASIC program] They were trying to starve us to death. We couldn’t even pay our lawyer. They tried to get us to settle, and we almost did, it was that bad. The arbitrator took nine months to issue his damn opinion. But when it was all over, the arbitrator ripped them apart for what they had done.
Bill Gates
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