I read that book recently and it was good. Interesting things to me about him:
- Grew up in a house where folks read. A lot.
- He loved reading about everything.
- He also read everything he could about technology.
- Fascinated by the possibilities offered by computers.
- Focused on what the future could be (what should exist but doesn’t yet?).
- Highly interested in possibilities and opportunities (what if).
- Loved Blaxploitation and Jimi Hendrix.
- Taught himself the guitar at 16 and never spent a week without playing, until his death.
I feel close. I’m not the co-founder of a trillion-dollar company, but I grew up quite similarly and I’ve been doing my own thing for sure.
At some point in the book, Paul says:
“It was 1967 and artificial intelligence was the hot theme in science-fiction. […] I closed with a prediction: “In fifty years, a robot with a fairly large brain cell capacity will be within reach”. Today it appears that I was highly optimistic. With 2017 around the corner, we’re still not close to match the abilities of the incalculably complex human brain.”
Paul passed away in 2018. Less than ten years later, the best AI is so good at so many things that it is literally making people pause about what the world is going to be in five years. We have no idea.
AI in 2026 does things that seemed absolutely not possible in 2017. I wish Paul had seen this with his own eyes and I wish I could hear his predictions. This man could write hand assembly! He would be so blown away, crying.
Lots of interesting things in the book like how Paul coined the name Micro-Soft, how important documentation was to the business, or how Bill Gates was making $2.25/hr programming in 1975 (software wasn’t valued much back then) or how involved Microsoft was already in 1979 in Japan (I had read how game programmers were hitting up MS in the early 80s to get help).
An interesting point compared to today’s tech business, is that no one was trying to “get rich”. They were all in “how to sustain a business that is ours, so that we keep doing cool stuff the way we want, and drink colas all day” mode. How Microsoft became a behemoth and made thousands of millionaires and a few billionaires, is secondary. First came the pride of making something useful, sold fairly. Nothing more, nothing less.
The fact that today’s tech is relentless in making people addicted, weakening people mentally, abusing every single skinner’s box tricks, makes it truly look like a nightmare compared to those early IT days of hippies in Albuquerque.