Finance-Software

This is by far the most personal look at Bill Gates I've ever seen. It gives an insider's view of what it was really like to work for Microsoft in the early years. This includes everything from Bill's temper tantrums to his personal hygiene and old girlfriends. A must read for any Bill Gates follower!

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.

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.