Christos Papadimitriou mentioned Bill Gates in this interview: <a href="http://awards.acm.org/info/papadimitriou_4558987.cfm" rel="nofollow">http://awards.acm.org/info/papadimitriou_4558987.cfm</a>.<p>Quote: "I remember thinking: "Such a brilliant kid. What a waste.""<p>I wonder what would happen if Gates went on to become an academic while Papadimitriou an entrepreneur. Maybe in some parallel universe.
Is Harvard proud of its "billionaire dropouts"? For anyone less successful I would think there would be some uneasiness in showcasing someone who never earned a degree. I mean when someone drops out it obviously means that the conventional university path failed them. This seems like a weird message to put in a school magazine. I guess Harvard can say that they at least helped Bill Gates on his path to founding Microsoft but they certainly can't claim them as one of their own?
"The goal was to get the program into less than the 4K of memory that an enhanced Altair would have, so there would be a little room left over for the consumer to use. (A 16GB smartphone has four million times that memory.) "<p><i>facepalm</i>