Review: John McAfee: A story with an end that's yet to be told...
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 25, 2012
John McAfee has certainly been newsworthy lately. This brilliant but seemingly disturbed Internet entrepreneur, the same man who founded the antivirus software company that still bears his name and later sold it to Intel for billions, has been playing a game of tag with authorities in Belize. They want to question him about the murder of Gregory Faull, a fellow American expatriate who was found murdered in his home, shot in the back of the head.Columnist and author Joshua Davis has written a short but fascinating Kindle Single withJohn McAfee's Last Stand, and he chronicles the software pioneer's life and adventures going back to when McAfee was the director of engineering at Omex in Santa Clara, California, at the age of 38. It turns out that McAfee was supplementing his income by selling cocaine to his co-workers while snorting it himself, and when he got too stoned to focus, he would offset it with Quaaludes.This tale reads like an almost-improbable suspense novel in ways, yet Joshua Davis' sometimes eclectic journalistic style carries through in this ongoing tale. He takes us back to 1986 when two Pakistani brothers released the first known computer virus aimed at PCs (out of curiosity), and how within a year it had infected computers around the world. McAfee, who had been sober for four years and was working at Lockheed, read a newspaper article mentioning that the brothers' virus had infected a computer in Georgia. He "found the idea terrifying" and decided to do something: he started McAfee Associates "out of his 700-square-foot home in Santa Clara," and by 1990 was making $5 million a year with little overhead.Author Davis chronicles how McAfee's ability to infect others with his own paranoia made him a wealthy man, and how in 1992 the company that bears his name made its debut on Nasdaq. Suddenly his shares were worth $80 million. But that's really the beginning of this tale, which I read initially as part of my subscription toWIRED Magazine. There's much more to this tale, as readers of this small, fast-reading book will discover.John McAfee's Last Standis an excellent Kindle Single that seems improbable, yet is proof that often fact can be stranger than fiction. It's also a story with an end that's yet to be told.11/25/2012