“Our hiring was always focused on people right out of school. We had a few key hires like Charles Simonyi who came in with experience. But most of our developers, we decided that we wanted them to come with clear minds, not polluted by some other approach, to learn the way that we liked to develop software, and to put the kind of energy into it that we thought was key.”
Bill Gates
Smithsonian Interview: Bill Gates (Primary source)
Bill Gates reflects on the early personal computing revolution, Microsoft’s role, and how software shaped the industry in this Smithsonian oral history interview from the Computer History Collection.
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“Few skills are more important than knowing how to distinguish what’s true from what’s false.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“The axiom that you learn more from your failures than your successes is trite but absolutely true.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.”
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— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“The busy man has few idle visitors; to the boiling pot the flies come not.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source