His biggest project, Xanadu, was to be a world-wide electronic publishing system that would have created a sort universal libary for the people.He is known for coining the term “hypertext.” He is also seen as something of a radical figure, opposing authority and tradition. He has been called “one of the most influential contrarians in the history of the information age.”
.. He was lonely as a child and had problems caused by his Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).
In 1960, he enrolled in graduate school at Harvard. During his first year he attempted a term project creating a writing system
similar to a word processor, but that would allow different versions and documents to be linked together nonlinearly, by association. This was, in part, an attempt to keep track of his own sometimes frantic associations and daydreamings brought about by his ADD.
Fortune: Inside the deal that made Bill Gates $350,000,000
Money has never been paramount to this unmarried scion of a leading Seattle family, whose father is a partner in a top Seattle law firm and whose mother is a regent of the University of Washington and a director of Pacific Northwest Bell. Gates, a gawky, washed-out blond, confesses to being a ’’wonk,’’ a bookish nerd, who focuses single mindedly on the computer business though he masters all sorts of knowledge with astounding facility. Oddly, Gates is something of a ladies’ man and a fiendishly fast driver who has racked up speeding tickets even in the sluggish Mercedes diesel he bought to restrain himself.
.. the sole venture capitalist in Microsoft (he and his firm had 6.2% of the stock), resolved to look into an offering. But Gates fretted. To forestall sticky questions from potential investors, he first wanted to launch two important products, one of them delayed over a year, and to sign a pending agreement with IBM for developing programs. He also wanted time to sound out key employees who owned stock or options and might leave once their holdings became salable on the public market. ’’I’m reserving the right to say no until October,’’ Gates warned. ’’Don’t be surprised if I call it off.’’
.. Gaudette loved it. ’’They’re in pain!’’ he crowed to Shirley. ’’They’re used to dictating, but they’re not running the show now and they can’t stand it.’’ Getting back on the phone, Gaudette crooned: ’’Eric, I don’t mean to upset you, but I can’t deny what’s in my head. I keep thinking of all that pent-up demand from individual investors, which you haven’t factored in. And I keep thinking we may never see you again, but you go back to the institutional investors all the time. They’re your customers. I don’t know whose interests you’re trying to serve, but if you’re playing both sides of the street, then we’ve just become adversaries.’’
Mary Karr Thinks You Shouldn’t Google Yourself
You write that a good memoir is not about ego. How so? Obviously, it has to be the most interesting version of you. But it’s not about peddling some highly polished version of yourself to a gullible public. We’ve all read bad novels that are that way. Narcissism is the bacterium infecting all bad writing.
The Rivals: Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman arrive at the University of Chicago – in 1932
Friedman arrived that autumn from New Jersey as a graduate student. A pair of Columbia University graduate students, Arthur Burns and Homer Jones, had been among his teachers at Rutgers University; they had urged him to defer his plan to become an actuary in favor of economics.
.. Milton Friedman and I became known as two poles, early on, but we managed to stay on civil and fairly friendly terms…. He is as bright a guy as you would ever meet. But I don’t think he realizes the tremendous number of mistakes he has made in his life. I don’t think anybody has read every item of Milton Friedman’s work in the world but me…. Sometimes I say he’s got such a high IQ that he’s got no protection against himself. He looks at his work and is satisfied with it. However, I think that it is a tragedy when somebody really takes the wrong train in life.
.. Samuelson arrived at Harvard in September 1935, expecting, he later said, a tidy little New England town. Instead he found a grimy industrial city with an old university at the leafy end of town.
.. Samuelson would talk to him for an hour after every lecture; it was in Wilson’s class that Samuelson had perhaps his single greatest epiphany, he recalled: the recognition that the truth of a mathematical tool was independent of the context in which it was employed. In this case it was the mathematics underlying a principle devised a century before by French chemist Henry LeChatelier to describe changes in pressure, volume and temperature of an ideal gas which could just as easily be adapted to calculate changes in elasticities of demand in a system of factor prices. The mathematical insight arrived in an instant. It would take a decade to reason through its implications.
.. Samuelson would recall: “He would say, ‘You never in economics kill a theory by fact; you kill a theory by a better theory.’”
.. pay attention instead to what consumers do with their money. The doctrine of “revealed preference” gave economists something to measure. Samuelson was “operationalizing” economics, defining a previously fuzzy concept in such a way that meaningful theorizing about it could be undertaken with a view to eventual testing.
.. Friedman found himself on the losing side of a department divided into two warring camps – quantitative up-and-comers vs. well-entrenched institutionalists. Friedman’s appointment suffered from a certain amount of straightforward anti-Semitism as well. When the department failed to approve the administration’s offer of a professorship, Friedman withdrew and returned east, to a job in the Treasury Department. Embarrassment and bitterness over the affair plagued the Wisconsin department for many years.
.. he timing of the invasion of Europe hinged on estimates of gross national product by Kuznets and his student Robert Nathan and their new National Income and Product Accounts ..
.. Friedman was assigned to build a Keynesian model of how much to raise taxes to pay for war. He helped create the income tax withholding system – an institution whose durability he came to regret in later years.
.. Friedman financed his drive to the Twin Cities by selling his furniture to the next family to rent his apartment
.. He came across stenographic copy of testimony he had given to a Congressional Committee as a Treasury official, explaining why an income tax would be better than a sales tax in preventing inflation. The war was six months old. “If inflation is to be prevented, it must be neutralized by measures that restrict consumer spending. Taxation is the most important of these measures; unless it is used quickly and severely, the other measures alone will be unable to prevent inflation.”
.. At every point, Friedman was dogged by suspicions elsewhere that his methods didn’t fully measure up to modern standards. The jokes multiplied: “Milton knows how to spell banana but he doesn’t know when to stop.”
.. Experience in controversies such as these brings out the impossibility of learning anything from facts till they are examined and interpreted by reason; and teaches that the most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves, who keeps in the background the part he has played, perhaps unconsciously, in selecting and grouping them, and in suggesting the argument post hoc ergo propter hoc.