born 1955
world's richest man

co-founder of Microsoft Corporation along with Paul Allen (current owner of the Portland Trailblazers)

Anyone who has ever bought a piece of software in a store has had the curiously deflating experience of taking the bright shrink-wrapped box home, tearing it open, finding that it's 95 percent air, throwing away all the little cards, party favors, and bits of trash, and loading the disk into the computer.  The end result (after you've lost the disk) is nothing except some images on a computer screen, and some capabilities that weren't there before.   Sometimes you don't even have that--you have a string of error messages instead. But your money is definitely gone. Now we are almost accustomed to this, but twenty years ago it was a very dicey business proposition. Bill Gates made it work anyway. He didn't make it work by selling the best software or offering the cheapest price. Instead he somehow got people to believe that they were receiving something in exchange for their money

  - Neal Stephenson - _In The Beginning Was The Command Line_

From:  The Bill Gates Interview  (_Playboy_ Magazine)
 

 A candid conversation with the sultan of software about outsmarting his rivals
(Full text at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Bill.Gates.html)

Excerpt:

PLAYBOY: When you were at Harvard, did you frequent the Combat Zone, home of hookers, drugs and adult films?

GATES: That's true. [Laughs] But just because I went there doesn't mean I engaged in everything that was going on.  But I did go there. It's easy, you just take the subway. And it's pretty inexpensive. I ate pizza, read books and watched what was going on. I went to the diners.
 

PLAYBOY: Ever take LSD?

GATES: My errant youth ended a long time ago.

PLAYBOY: What does that mean?

GATES: That means there were things I did under the age of 25 that I ended up not doing subsequently.

PLAYBOY: One LSD story involved you staring at a table and thinking the corner was going to plunge into your eye.

GATES: [Smiles]

PLAYBOY: Ah, a glimmer of recognition.

GATES: That was on the other side of that boundary.  The young mind can deal with certain kinds of gooping around that I don't think at this age I could. I don't think you're as capable of handling lack of sleep or whatever challenges you throw at your body as you get older.  However, I never missed a day of work.

Harvard undergrads Gates and Allen develop the first programming language for the Altair 8800, a version of the public-domain language Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC). They form another company, Micro-Soft, to license the language to Altair's management and set up shop near MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
  

The power of the word runs throughout TechGnosis - from Guttenberg's printed Bible to the study of the Kaballah, from William Gibson's  _Neuromancer to the use of hypertext on the Net. Interestingly, anyone using the most recent Microsoft Word without questioning the way it works will be writing and formatting according to Microsoft structures. The software automatically queries letter and fax structure. It also automatically queries any unusual sentence structure - James Joyce would have gone  berserk. It is also essentially American grammar only. While most prompts can be shut off, many users would take them as a gift. So given Microsoft's current dominance, is Bill Gates the master of the  word? Move over Moses, move over the Kabballa?

- Erik Davis

Hakim Bey on Bill Gates

For example. Is he the leader of this thing or is he just pushed forward on the wave of some  kind of techno-economic development and if it was not Bill Gates it would be someone else.

Robert Anton Wilson likes to quote: "When it is steam engine time it steam engines." - Charles Fort.
 

Like when it is time to rain it rains. When it is time for steam engines some vast IT produces the steam engine. In fact we know plenty of examples where the same scientific discovery is made simultanously by five or six people within minutes around the world. Not because of some Jungianarchetypal anima floating around but because science got to that point. And five or six people were smart enough to realise it right away. There is also the point that the first  working steam engine was actually built on an incorrect scientific theory, if I am not  mistaken. It was made by someone who thought he was doing one thing but actually did something else alltogether and it just  appened to be a steam engine. That happens plenty of   times too.

The problem with conspiracy theory is to believe that there is one particular group of human beings who are in control of my destiny. That's a philosophical extreme to which I don't  wanna go.

On the other side it's obvious that people do conspire. That there are conspiracies, secret forces behind outward political shows of power.

It is clear that there is not one single known politician in America who has any real power at  all. They are simply working for big  corporations and economic interests like oil, or the  global market itself. The best model is, that there are many, at least several conspiracies and  that they interlock, that they compete, that they melt into each other, that they separate from  each other. If we wanna know what's going on, if we wanna understand history as it is  happening we should know something about these conspiracies.   Again critical consciousness is a useful tool here.

- _Hakim Bey Talks With Users of Public Netbase 3/18/95_

• Harvard Law School dropout
• current worth : approx. $65 Billion (topped out around $100 Billion in 1999)
• he is left handed
• Anomalog:
  • Bill Gates Voodoo Doll
  • Bill Gates, Eternal Dork, Bullies Mike Rowe, 17

the ascii equivalent to "william gates III" (counting the "III" as a "3") add up to 666
The real name of  Bill Gates is William Henry Gates III.
Nowadays he is known as Bill Gates (III), where "III" means
the order of third (3rd.)

By converting the letters of his current name to the ASCII-
values (which are used in computers) you will get the
following:

B    I    L    L    G    A    T    E    S    3

66 + 73 + 76 + 76 + 71 + 65 + 84 + 69 + 83 + 3 = 666

"no one will ever need more than 640k of memory"

an actual Intel chip magnified

Bill Gates, launched his business career in 1969, at age 14 by forming a company named Lakeside Programming Group.  Gates and his friend Paul Allen signed an agreement with Computer Center Corporation to report bugs in PDP-10 software, in exchange for computer time.

• piece: _Dear Bill Gates_ by Allan Sekula (1999)

• witnessed MOCA 11/21/00 at the _Flight Patterns_ exhibition
• 3 photographs, 1 typewritten letter:
• November 30, 1999



Dear Bill Gates,

I swam past your dream house the other day,
but didn't stop to knock.  Frankly, your
underwater sensors had me worried.  I would
have liked to take a look at Winslow Homer's
_Lost On The Grand Banks_.  It's a great painting,
but speaking as a friend and fellow citizen,
at $30 million you paid too much.

HIGHEST PRICE EVER PAID FOR AN AMERICAN
PAINTING!!!

So why are you so interested in a picture
of two poor lost dory fishermen, momentarily
high on a swell, peering into a wall of fog?
They're about as high as they're ever going
to be, unless the sea gets uglier.  They are
going to die you know, and it won't be a pretty
death.


And as for you Bill, when you're on the net,
are you lost? Or found?

And the rest of us -- lost or found -- are we on it,
or in it?

Your friend

• track _Gates Does Windows_ MP3 (160k) by Banco De Gaia off of _Big Men Cry_ promo CD  on Mammoth/Planet Dog (1997)
• indie pop track _Bill Gates Must Die_ MP3 by John Vanderslice off of _Mass Suicide Occult Figurines_ on Barsuk (2000)
• instrumental lo fi indie pop track _Majestic_ MP3 by Clinic off of _The Return Of Evil Bill_ 7" on Domino (2000)
• 604 track _Gates Of Karma_ MP3 by Mittelstandskinder Ohne Strom off of _Holy Mushroom_ compilation CDx2 on High Society (1997)

pOrtals:
Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock
Bill Gates' house and property assessment
Bill Gates' property information

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