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In reply to the discussion: Why do we work harder than Germans? [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Steven Paul Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 October 5, 2011) (was born to two Berkeley students and then adopted.)
The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Steve was five years old.[1][2] Paul and Clara later adopted a daughter, Patti. Paul Jobs, a machinist for a company that made lasers, taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands.[1] Clara was an accountant,[16] who taught him to read before he went to school.[1] Clara Jobs had been a payroll clerk for Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech firms in what became known as Silicon Valley.[18]
Jobs attended Monta Loma Elementary, Mountain View, Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California.[2] He frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California, and was later hired there, working with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[19] Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[20] he continued auditing classes at Reed, while sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.[21] Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."[
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955)
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His parents are of English, German, and Scotch-Irish descent.[10][11] His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates's maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had the "II" suffix.[12] Early on in his life, Gates' parents had a law career in mind for him.[13] When Gates was young, his family regularly attended a Congregational church.[14][15][16]
At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school.[17] When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students.[18] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he said, "There was just something neat about the machine."[19] After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside studentsGates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evansfor the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[20]
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via Teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success."[19] At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.[21] In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.[22]
Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT[23] and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973.[24] While at Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer, who later succeeded Gates as CEO of Microsoft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
Steven Anthony "Steve" Ballmer (born March 24, 1956)
Ballmer was born in Detroit, Michigan to a Swiss American father and a Jewish American mother. He grew up in the affluent community of Farmington Hills, Michigan. In 1973, he attended college prep and engineering classes at Lawrence Technological University and graduated from Detroit Country Day School, a private college preparatory school in Beverly Hills, Michigan and now sits on its board of directors. In 1977, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a A.B. in mathematics and economics.
At college, Ballmer managed the football team, worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the Harvard Advocate, and lived down the hall from fellow sophomore Bill Gates. He then worked for two years as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble, where he shared an office with Jeffrey R. Immelt, who later became CEO of General Electric.[5] In 1980, he dropped out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business to join Microsoft.[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer
Sometimes the year of your birth can make a big difference, as can what your parents do for a living, where you live -- and what part of the world your soul happens to land in.
Would Bill Gates have done as well had he been born in Little Rock, Arkansas? (No insult intended to Arkansas, but would his family have been able to send him to an elite school).
Who you happen to meet during your life makes an enormous difference. If you are born in 1981, daughter of a 14-year-old gang member and grow up in the 'hood in LA, the odds that if you work really hard, you can drop out of Harvard and start a company like Microsoft are not very high.
Fate and fortune play a role in who gets what and how they get it.
Helps to be born brilliant, but again how much work goes into being born brilliant?
Still, you can have fate, fortune, talent and brilliance and still make a terrible mess of your life. So good sense and hard work do play a role. But luck plays an even bigger one.