11 Oct 2009
1 Comment[Book Review]: Outliers: The Story of Success
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Published by Little, Brown and Co.
WorldCat • LibraryThing • Google Books • BookFinder
Malcolm Gladwell’s counter intuitive take on success. He downplays virtuosic brilliance in favour of timing and sheer hard work. Less research driven than some of his words, like all Gladwell books, a fast and easy read. It was almost spooky to read the birth years of people creating the first generation of software companies given that the range includes mine. Also, Malcolm’s discussion of his own background was moving and very personal storytelling at its best connecting his mixed racial origins with British colonial structures.
The 'Bun Reunion - Celebrating the 1970's Roots of the Digital Age | Randall Howard
July 16, 2012 @ 00:42
[…] In retrospect, it was a fortuitous time to be young and engaged in computing. A fluid group of enthusiast programmers, “The Hacks” (a variant of the term “Hackers” popularized by MIT, yet not to be confused with the later “Crackers” who were all about malicious security breaches), revelled in getting these expensive machines (yet by today’s standards underpowered) to do super-human feats. The early 1970′s was the decade when software was coming into its own as a free-standing discipline, for the first time unbundled, and unshackled, from the underlying hardware. The phenemena of the timing of one’s birth affecting whole careers is eerily (the years are the same as my own) described by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2009 book Outliers. […]