Fair Warning: The Africa Tour Journal was absolutely completed with yesterday’s entry. There is nothing on this page that contributes anything to that work. It is just this: There is this wispy thread of conversations about Bill Gates that seemed to occur throughout the tour (September 30 -Bill's height, October 9 - Bill's sex) . . . And, not being one that can ever leave well enough alone, I feel compelled to relate one final anecdote in that thread that occurred on the long flight home.
The eleven hour flight home proved to be even more excruciatingly boring than other flights in the trip. I could not sleep. The movies were bad. Sigrid was sleeping. Three hours into the flight, with over seven hours still to go, the charge on the Toshiba was gone. As I put the Toshiba away, the Brit on my left started a conversation. Desperate for diversion, I encouraged him. I thought I would regret it immediately when he asked what I did for a living, with my response prompting the usual immediate discussion of Bill Gates. With a sigh, I told him what I knew about Bill, but was surprised to learn it was all old news for him.
It turns out that he was a graduate student at Oxford specializing in the history of software technology. For his doctoral thesis he was analyzing the actual code written by Bill Gates in the original Microsoft Basic version 1.0. He felt that he had could gain incredible insights into the mind and personality of Bill Gates by studying the code that Bill had written himself. Since he had not yet finished the thesis, he was reluctant to go into much detail. Despite my general lack of interest in the subject, I must admit that my curiosity got the better of me and I was able to pry out of him one amazing nugget of his research.
It seems that Bill was suffering from a particularly acute case of hemorrhoids while he was writing the Microsoft Basic code. This fellow claimed that by analyzing the structure of the code itself, he could tell which routines were written while Bill was sitting and which were written while he was standing up. Through a brilliant application of Chaos Theory, he claims to prove that the shape of the software industry today is a direct consequence of the extreme discomfort Bill was experiencing while developing this code. He goes on to conclude that if Extra Strength Preparation H had been brought to market even two months earlier, Microsoft would have gone out of business by 1987, and Bill would be managing a Starbucks franchise in Tacoma today.
I was frankly amazed to learn how much the Brits know about Bill Gates.
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