Programmers At Work

May 20, 2008

Bill Gates 1986-2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — sml @ 6:18 am
Tags: , , , ,

Today I’ve posted the Bill Gates interview under the PAW–1986 interviews column at the right.

Let’s just say a little water has gone under the bridge since my interview in 1986. I’m sure many of you will enjoy reading this interview and noting all the quaint antiquities…like BASIC…the still amazing way code had to be squeezed into tiny amounts of memory, and also the predictions or lack thereof…it’s a revelation about how hard and yet easy it is to see the future…Gates could see that we were entering the “information” age and wanted to tackle it for the PC in a big way, via putting a multimedia multi-volume encyclopedia on CD ROM, which at the time was like imagining how to shovel the universe into a shoebox (I know because that’s the job I did for Microsoft at the time.) But today we look back on it as quaint with the way we’ve brought the universe to our fingertips via the internet. Little did we know at the time there was no need to shovel it into the pc shoebox. Instead we needed to imagine how we could shoot it and a dynamic web of other information around the planet into your offices on wires.

So enjoy this old and precious conversation with Bill because I sure did. He’s an amazing person to spend time with and I feel privileged to have worked with him back in those early days.

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