Bill Gates Talk From 1989 Surfaces

70sstar writes "A 1-1/2 hour recording of Bill Gates addressing a crowd of university students in 1989 was recently found and digitized, and has been circulating in some IRC channels for the past few weeks. The speech has found a permanent home on the web page of the University of Waterloo CS Club, where the talk is reported to have taken place. Gates covers the past, present, and future of computing as of 1989. While the former two might be of interest to tech historians, the real fascination is Gates's prediction of computing yet to come. Like the now-legendary '640k' remark, some of his comments are almost laughably off-target ('OS/2 is the way of the future!'). And yet, by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development. All in all, a fascinating talk from one of the most powerful speakers in CS and IT."

OS/2...

You do know that the NT4 core is extremely similar to OS/2, and the only reason they diverged is because of a fight between IBM and MS?

Shh...poster was being smug!

Don't interfere with Bill-Bashing!

Re:Shh...poster was being smug!

It is funny to hear it straight from Gates though. He owes almost his entire fortune to IBM's failure to deliver on OS/2, and (to be fair) Microsoft's successful delivery of DOS+Windows (crap that it was).

Re:Shh...poster was being smug!

I agree, DOS (like Windows) could so easily have gone to a competitor instead. I guess it just shows how pivotal certain moments can be. IBM in particular made blunder after blunder, refusing the take the PC seriously. I guess their mainframes were doing just fine and they didn't want to open their eyes to the implications of Moore's Law - that $500 PCs would ultimately take most of the market for computing hardware. Just like all the others - Sun, Silicon Graphics, Cray, DEC...

Imagine...

Imagine you have the only Mercedes-Benz dealership, every morning customers are lined up, check-books ready. Year after year. You are rich beyond imagination.

Then one day this fellow shows up with a Vespa and says, "You should sell these Vespa scooters too.."

What do you do..?

Re:Imagine...

Then one day this fellow shows up with a Vespa and says, "You should sell these Vespa scooters too.." What do you do..?

I repeatedly slam a car door against your head for using yet another computer/car analogy on Slashdot

Re:Shh...poster was being smug!

I don't think you have the story quite right.

IBM was a victim of its unintended success. The first generation IBM PCs were crippled compared to what they could have been, in almost every way. They could have had a much better processor. They could even have run a real operating system. Instead it was low rent all the way, outsourcing as much as they could, because they were making a cheapo product they expected to sell only moderately well. They built a computer that was inferior to the Apple II which had been available for several years. Radio Shack had a 68000 based computer running Unix that was introduced around the same time. These could have been a serious threat, but IBM produced a toy computer, put it in a business like case, and slapped the IBM logo on it.

If you were working in those days (1981-1982), things started out as planned. IBM PCs were appearing on desks as a status symbol. There wasn't much useful you could do on them. Then in 1983 came Lotus 1-2-3, and suddenly all those PCs became very useful. In the same year, came the Compaq portable, the first 100% "IBM Compatible".

The disruption of IBM's business came not from their misunderstanding the rate of technological change. They were attempting to slow the impact of change on their existing product lines by introducing a low end product of their own that was positioned low enough that it wouldn't hurt their existing product lines.

This would have been a good strategy if they hadn't failed to anticipate the success of the product. They didn't even bother to get exclsuive rights to DOS. By making a proprietary PC, they actually accelerated the penetration of microcomputer vendors into their customer base.

Well...

You have to admit that it's easier to predict the future when you're the one making it... :]

That said, the places where he was wrong are more interesting to me. I wonder what Microsoft's business plan was had IBM taken over with OS/2 instead of them?

Re:Well...

That said, the places where he was wrong are more interesting to me. I wonder what Microsoft's business plan was had IBM taken over with OS/2 instead of them?

It was to rake in (slightly less) dough selling OS/2.

OS/2 was originally a joint Microsoft/IBM effort. What became Windows NT was originally going to be the next version of OS/2, but tensions between MS and IBM increased until Microsoft decided to take its ball and go home.

So really, Bill Gates was 100% correct in saying that OS/2 is the wave of the future. It's just that in 1989 he didn't realize that it was going to be renamed "Windows NT" 3 or 4 years later. Had Microsoft instead decided to continue working with IBM, they would probably still have ended up being stinking rich, just a bit less so.

Re:Well...

OS/2 and NT are different animals.

OS/2 was originally a joint Microsoft/IBM venture and was to replace Windows, but there were squabbles over the API definition which caused Microsoft to rethink the whole plan. By that time, the Windows(3.0) API had become a defacto standard and the world's most valuable computer technology.

MS realized that abandoning Windows (and control of the API) was a huge mistake, so they didn't. They went ahead with OS/2, but kept Windows as their primary platform. They knew that they still needed a "real" OS to replace Windows' DOS underpinnings, so they started the NT project.

Windows remained as the market standard and MS remained as the gatekeeper to the API. OS/2 customers who wanted to run/develop apps for the "standard" system would also need a Windows license. And perhaps even more important than their ability to sell licenses, is the fact that by controlling the API, they get a huge head start over the competition when it comes to designing developer tools and applications around that API.

Re:Shh...poster was being smug!

He owes almost his entire fortune to IBM's failure to deliver on OS/2, and (to be fair) Microsoft's successful delivery of DOS+Windows (crap that it was).

Gates began programming at age thirteen, at age fourteen he is clearing $20,000 in is first partnership with Allen. Microsoft is founded in 1975. Microsoft in in Japan in 1978. In Europe in 1979. In 1980 Microsoft is young, hungry, and moving a hell of lot faster than Kildall.

How did you get modded +5

It says a lot about /. these days. During the days of Olsen, he started a re-write of VMS. It had such luminaries as Cutler and Bell on the team. When the company was bleeding, Olsen killed off this project and others. When Gates got wind of this, he approached Cutler (and others such as Grey and Bell), and convinced him to join him. One of the bigger issues was that he promised the core to the VMS folks. He would control the API and above. They would control the core.
ANd if that was not enough, back in 94, I even saw the code for NT (I worked at HP and a neighboring group were asked to port it to the pa-risc. ). I can tell you firsthand that it had NOTHING to do with OS2. If you looked at it, you knew it was dec derivitive. Even the comments said it all.
 
So how did you get modded up?

Re:How did you get modded +5

APIs are surface features which are (usually) made visible for applications to use, and they give very little indication of the nature or structure of the actual kernel code running underneath.

OS/2 supports the POSIX API via EMXRT.DLL, for example, and yet OS/2's kernel has very little in common with, say, Linux or Solaris (which both also support POSIX programs).

The 32-bit OS/2 kernel written by IBM for OS/2 2.0 and later and the Windows NT 4 kernel are quite different. Both Microsoft and IBM completely re-implemented their respective OS's kernels after the 16-bit OS/2 days, and the resulting software has very little relationship to the old 16-bit kernels except for support for the older 16-bit APIs. But as I said, that is simply a surface similarity.

Re:eComStation still has superior technology

The thing most people don't realize is that even the 1996 flavor of OS/2 Warp 4 is capable of running modern software like Firefox and OpenOffice, and it does so rather well on fairly limited hardware.

Windows has a hard time doing that these days, and Linux is travelling in that direction (at least in terms of the mainstream distros, which seem to have abandoned legacy hardware support for eye candy).

Re:OS/2...

You do know that the NT4 core is extremely similar to OS/2

Actually as an OS Engineer that has spent time working with and tearing both apart, they are very much night and day.

You would have more success in selling OS/2 is the same as BSD.

Here are a couple of things to get you started, and I could point out a few inaccuracies in each of these, but for the most part they will send you down the right path:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windo ws_NT [wikipedia.org]

Now where you are partially correct. NT started out in the OS/2 3.0 development stages, but by the time MS and IBM split, NT was a start from scratch OS as Dave Cutler thought the OS/2 codebase was horrible.

MS even looked at using *nix concepts in the early days of NT, since it was being written from the ground up, and why MS held on to Xenix at the time in case that is the direction the NT team wanted to go with NT or base it on

However the NT team felt the *nix architecture concepts were too limited and instead decided to take the best OS theories at the time and see if they could truly make a new OS technology.

I get so tired of kids today confusing simple things and I see this crap on here all the time. NT is not VMS, NT was not OS/2, NT and Win95 are not related other than the Win32 subsystem, WinXP does not contain Win9x code, etc etc...

No wonder people think Windows is more of a joke than it already is, if I saw it as a hybrid and hodgepodge of Win9x and OS/2 and NT I would think it was an insane code base too; however, it is not.

It is easy to poke fun at Windows, but when you find real OS engineers, the NT architecture/kernel isn't quite so funny and gets quite a bit of respect even if they hate the Win32 subsystem.

No MS conspiracy required for OS/2 failure

What legendary rock-n-roll song was used at the gala release celebration for OS/2? Oh, that's right, there was no celebration. OS/2's number one reason for failing was that IBM didn't make much of an effort to make it a success.

Re:OS/2...

I think you mean OS/2 ran DOS (including win3.x) in VDMs. But you are right, in win32s ver 30 MS moved some DLLs above the 2GB mark just to break OS/2 which at the time had a 512 MB per process limitation and still does for most apps. Wasn't until ver 4.5 that the client could access 3 GBs and some APIs are still tied to the 512 MB barrier.
And yes, don't know about MAC OSX but the newer Windows and Linuxes still seem broken compared to what the WPS could do on a 486 (with lots of memory, hopefully at least 32 MB)

Maybe he was taking the party line

To the computer enthusiasts of the time, it would have been even more laughable had Bill Gates said "in the next two decades, Microsoft software will completely destroy OS/2, will render Apple a shell of its former self by stealing all its innovations, and will demand 1 GB of RAM." So even if he had his world domination plans set in 1989, he couldn't exactly let the world know without being laughed at.

Transcript?

Is there a transcript anywhere? Or at least a summary? I don't have the time to listen to an hour and a half mp3.

Re:Transcript?

I don't have the time to listen to an hour and a half mp3

Crude index:

• 28:00 Developer teams
• 36:00 Mouse
• 50:00 Unix
• 52:40 Mac
• 56:00 PARC people
• 57:00 Mac GUI/Microsoft developers
• 63:00 Third standard
• 66:30 Networks
• 71:50 Lotus/Excel competition
• 75:00 "World Net"
• 76:50 Multimedia
• 79:40 Utility of the CD (Thanks music industry!)
• 87:00 Learn from competitors
• 87:50 Hypertext

Actually Gates was quite insightful. He clearly understood what was important for the evolution of the personal computer, but didn't quite manage to have Microsoft dominate all of it, fortunately. When he discussed Unix in one section, and importance of networks in another, he never mentioned anything about security, which is an important element of Unix design. Later he mentions the "World Net", but of course did not anticipate HTTP and browsers. This makes his comments about hypertext all the more interesting; he correctly states massive amounts of typeless links would overwhelm the user. The significance of search, among other things, eluded his thinking at the time. Gates' discussion of a third standard is interesting to ponder in view of OSS, which could be considered the answer to his question about what other approach might gain traction. Overall his prognostications were quite correct. If he is as astute today as he was then with regard to humanitarian issues, his health initiatives should do a lot of good.

But

I really do only need 640k. As long as I can play Scramble on my Vic 20 I'll be happy for life.

640k remark

Like the now-legendary '640k' remark

A better description would have been the "mythical '640k' remark", because he never said it [tafkac.org].

Nobody can ever cite a source for this alleged quote, and in the absence of such a source, you have to take his word for it. It's impossible to prove a negative; that's how urban legends start in the first place.

(If he did say it, don't you think someone would have figured out the where and when?)

Re:640k remark

The exact 640k quote from the talk: "So that's a 1 MB address space. And in that original design I took the upper 340k and decided that a certain amount should be for video memory, a certain amount for the ROM and I/O, and that left 640k for general purpose memory. And that leads to today's situation where people talk about the 640k memory barrier; the limit of how much memory you can put to these machines. I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. . That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem."

That's the kind of lack of foresight

Then you have the Motorola 68000, designed in the late 1970s and used in home computers in the mid 1980s - capable of addressing a whopping 16MB of memory

and the street price for 16 MB of RAM in 1980 would have been...what, exactly?

It's this kind of lack of foresight that made the whole x86 architectue crappy.
The question is not only what is realistic to do now and what would be not be possible to buy/build.

The question is, if this architecture hangs around for the next couple of decade what will you be happy to have taken account for ? What could be useful for future generations of machines ?

The 68k has been designed on purpose to have a clean architecture, that could easily evolve in future machine without needing hacks. (32 bits internal, even if first versions had 16bit bus. Flat memory addressing, etc.)

The x86 has been a long series of very short-sighted choice (because nobody tougth it could last) - like the "640k ought to be enough for everyone" (it was back then, it wasn't any more a couple of years later) or the ackward instruction set - and subsequent hacks to circumvent the limitations (the whole segmentation logic is a pain in the ass). Not to say about all legacy modes that current chips still drag around (your Core 2 is still binary compatible with 8088 code and assembly compatible with 8080 code). Intel has tried to restart something completly new and supposedly better with the Itanium, but it failed, mainly because of all this legacy. AMD was somewhat more successful with AMD64 (because it both has a nice new clean x86-64 extension and support for all the ackwrd legacy).

It's only sad that the x86 was chosen for the IBM PC, a computer whose architecture was subsequently opened and copied by numerous clones that IBM chose to tolerate, which made this architecture popular and made it evolve very quickly.
Whereas the 68k regularly ended up in very nice machines (Amiga, Macintosh, etc.) but whose parent company never accepted to open. And thus remained less popular (because of higher price and lower development by 3rd parties).

At least the 68k had much more success in video games (consoles and arcades. MegaDrive and NeoGeo if i have to only site two).

Re:640k remark

Probably adding fuel to the fire was the fact that the memory limitations held for so long. I've always been into graphics and animation and the early memory issues were a major hassle. Even today shortsightedness about memory has been a major hassle for Windows. Win 2000 had a 2 gig cap and XP had a 4 gig. With the average person being able to aford 4 gig of ram and graphics people needing all the ram they can get it's bizzare with cheap ram to have such limitations. Vista is an improvement but there is a major system ram charge to get it and there still a cap that will be soon reached. He may not say Win 2000 users will never need more than 2 gig of ram but it's the way the company approaches it. Back when Amiga was around it always ran circles around Windows machines for memory. I always loved the fact that a lot of components came with extra ram slots. The Amiga 3000 had a ram limit in range of modern machines and that was 17 years ago. He may not have declared 640k was enough but he's hardly a visionary where memory is concerned.

One thing is obvious from the photograph

Most geeks' dress sense hasn't changed much since 1989 ;)

Re:One thing is obvious from the photograph

That's because geeks have a genetically-implanted dress sense from hyper-intelligent beings from another world. Those who lack the genes necessary give in to their ancestral ape-man desires for suits and ties.

Re:One thing is obvious from the photograph

Most geeks' dress sense hasn't changed much since 1989 ;)

Fancy that :P. How foolish of us geeks not to buy into the "hip" mantra. But hey, come up with a less idiotic accessory than a tie (which, seriously was probably invented by a closet S&M freak) and we'll talk business =D. Another fancy I have is that the suit was invented by the same sadist who invented the corset and high heels for women. Gimme a tshirt and pair of jeans anytime. The Linux fanbois can have the penguin suits =D.

______

"What's flamebait daddy?"

Predict the future

What kind of business are you in?

We predict the future. The best way to predict the future... is to invent it.

-X-Files

He thought OS/2 would be the perfect platform...

...for Duke Nukem Forever.

30 minutes

1-1/2 hour = 30 minutes

Oh wait...

Ahem..

You ARE posting on slashdot. Let me correct your statement...

Everyone cares about these fabulous corrections and technicalities. Keep it coming, it's really bitchin'.

Long Road Home

I think that's the name of his book he published back in the early 90s. Pretty much he predicted the past decade perfectly. I don't know if predicted is the right word since it's his products that he was saying would come out in the next ten years. I guess he's just a really bright guy with a strong ability to estimate the market and development time (Zune not withstanding). He was only off on hardware. He over estimated somethings (credit card sized pocket PCs as powerful as a tower) and underestimated (sheer volume of online gaming)

I remember this talk.

I was a fledgling member of the CSC at Waterloo, and I recognize the members in the photos they showed. I also remember attending this talk with a front row seat. I was sort of unimpressed because he didn't discuss anything that was new or that I didn't already know about.

Predictions

And yet, by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development.

Shouldn't be all that surprising, since he more or less controlled the direction of desktop software development in the 90's. I would assume he just stated his vision of the future of software, and that vision was implemented.

Prophecies? I think not!

And yet, by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development.

Must be one of the perks of becoming the head of a monopoly powerful enough to dictate an entire market. He got to fulfill his own prophecies, whether they were good ideas or not.

good job Bill

.... you managed to look less geeky than whole group.

CS club = check spelling?

Nice to know that CS geeks can't spell 'seamless.'

In all seriousness, it sounds interesting, but I don't have 90 minutes to listen to someone talk. Anyone know if transcriptions are being worked on?

And why would they even bother to make a .WAV available? This is a 20-something geek talking, not the London Symphony Orchestra.

Gates-Quotes from a 1990 interview

From Chip Magazin 1/1990 (my re-translation from German):

"I think about Handwriting recognition. In two or three years, we may have computers without keyboards. In five or six years this will change, and voice recognition will reduce the importance of graphics."

"In five or six years, DOS [sales] will be overtaken by OS/2."

The he said he is personally using "a Mac II, a Compaq and a IBM" computer, as well as a "NEC-Ultralite".

Prophesy? I don't think so

" And yet, by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development."

Yeah? Gee, if he was once such a savant, what happened between then and his 1995 book "The Road Ahead" where he totally fails to "predict" the Internet and World Wide Web when it had already happened?

Sorry, but reciting some corrollary to Moore's Law does not count as accurate prophesy, 'chilling' or otherwise. It's just conventional wisdom

Everyone's predictions are wrong.

He's the richest dude in the world and his OS is on almost every PC in the world, but let's laugh that he predicted something wrong in 1989! Hahaha, that totally evens things out.

Gee, I feel better for me now.

Why can't he say "processor"?

Is anyone else annoyed by his pronunciation of the word "processor"? It's more like "prosser", the way he says it. I wonder how he says the word "nuclear"...

Yes, But..

And yet, by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development. All in all, a fascinating talk from one of the most powerful speakers in CS and IT

I didn't have time to RTFA or STFV (see the f***in video), but did he predict anything even remotely close to the concept of Linux?

I don't think so.

Enough with the conspiracy theories

I'm top-posting this instead of replying to individual posts because there are just so many posts with one conspiracy theory or another. Microsoft tricked IBM into taking OS/2, Microsoft made Office 95 break OS/2, etc. etc.

I worked at Microsoft from 1990 to 1996, and during part of that time I worked on Microsoft Word. And I'm here to tell you: Microsoft really believed in OS/2, back in the day. They really thought it would be the future.

In 1990, I got an OS/2 machine on my desk, as did the other folks around me, because we all knew OS/2 was the future. The MS library had OS/2 machines for looking up books (and as far as I remember, the MS library had only OS/2 machines). And all the major MS apps were shipped for OS/2: Word, Excel, etc. (But they were also shipped for Windows. MS covered all the bets.)

Now, I was only a lowly developer, not a strategy architect, and I never ate lunch with Bill Gates, so it's possible there was some amazing subterfuge going on without me knowing. But I don't believe it.

Here is my summary of what happened, based on what I saw then, and on various articles I read in PC Week, Infoworld, etc.

Microsoft started developing Windows back in the 80's. The early Windows was a laughingstock in the industry: it was a primitive toy. Apple seriously jump-started their GUI efforts by building a closed platform and tailoring their GUI specifically for that platform; Microsoft was hobbled by the suckiness of the 8088 and awful graphics adapters like the CGA card. MS actually tried to get Windows to run on that sort of pathetic hardware. Windows 1.0 did run but no one wanted it.

MS doesn't give up easily. They kept plugging away at Windows, and it started to suck less, as the machines got more powerful. Also, IBM and Microsoft decided to cooperate on a new OS: OS/2.

Microsoft wanted to make OS/2 as compatible as possible with Windows, to make it easy to port applications. IBM wanted to make OS/2 "better" than Windows. (My memory is dim here, I don't remember specifically why it was better to be incompatible with Windows. Compatible with some graphics API that IBM already had?) So now, the plan was to sell Windows only until OS/2 conquered the world. But the Windows guys kept plugging away on Windows, even as the OS/2 guys did their thing.

Around the time I was hired, Microsoft and IBM were telling customers that basically if you have lame hardware, go ahead and run Windows on it, but if you have good hardware, you want OS/2 because that is the future. (IIRC the decision point was: if you have less than two megabytes of RAM, run Windows.)

Then, in 1990, Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0... and everyone, including Microsoft, was stunned by how well it sold. It flew off the shelves. Egghead (at the time, a successful brick-and-mortar chain of computer stores) sent trucks with ice cream over to Microsoft; along with everyone else, I had a free ice cream bar to celebrate the success of Windows 3.0.

The key feature was actually that it ran DOS apps very well. You could have multiple DOS shells open at the same time, and it would multitask them well (pre-emptive multitasking, even though Windows itself used round-robin multitasking for Windows apps at the time!). You could even have a DOS app crash, and your other DOS apps would keep running just fine. Compare with the "compatibility box" in OS/2, which was usually called the "Chernobyl Box" by geeks because a misbehaving DOS app could take down your whole machine. The Chernobyl Box could only run a single DOS app at a time.

Why? Why was Windows 3.0 better than OS/2? Because at the time OS/2 was written only to support the 286, and even if you ran it on a 386 it would just run in 286 mode. Windows 3.0 would only do the cool DOS app multitasking if you ran it on a 386. My understanding is that IBM promised, early on, that OS/2 would run great on a 286; and IBM felt it was seriously important to keep that promise. With hindsight, I

Re:Enough with the conspiracy theories

Steve Ballmer made a great speech a company meeting. He said that Microsoft had been sending a mixed message to customers: if you have this kind of hardware buy Windows, if you have that kind of hardware buy OS/2. He said that from now on, there would be a new message: "Windows! Windows! Windows!!!" He shouted himself hoarse saying it.

I guess that was practice for his "Developers developers developers developers" speech.

Bill Gates != Genius/Prophet

The guy made some lucky/good decisions at the right time. It could have been anyone with half a clue about computers, but it was him.
 
Credit is due for his business skills he used to run with the break he got and make it the enormous success it is.
 
Of course, opportunity and a slice of luck crosses most peoples path now and then, he was smart enough to recognise it and had enough business savvy to not blow it.
 
Bottomline... Genius, prophet, guru programmer... NAH! Lucky Bastard! Yep ;-)

OS/6 Preceded OS/2

True. And it was IBM, and it really was called "OS/6." Around 1976 IBM came out with a series of console word processors using early ink jet technology. There were variations among the models, and they used 8" floppies. Very small video screens that could not display an entire line, with embedded commands.

They were very successful at the time, implementing the Selectric keyboard, which remains one of the best electric keyboards of all time. By the mid 80's however, they were dimming, and of course overtaken by PC's and early laserjets.

Here is the video version of the presentation

http://www.core77.com/corehome/story.kermit.jpg [core77.com]

even a broken clock...

is right twice a day; Doesn't mean it's working.

prophecy

>by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development.

It was a self fulfilling prophecy. As the head of microsoft he was in a position to make things happen the way
he wanted them to. He's no prophet.

Gates is definately OG

Original Geek that is. One of the few.

One of the extremely few smart enough to get rich doing it.

Of that very small bunch, he did it the best.

Get over it, Bill is geekier and smarter than you.

Pwned.

kermit

I just downloaded the mp3 onto my iPod and put the headphones on to listen. For a second I actually thought it was Kermit the frog talking. I'm not sure I can listen to all this.

Or maybe it's Robin, Kermit's nephew? Very weird.

Yes, the cat did get my tongue, actually.

> some of his comments are almost laughably off-target ('OS/2 is the way of the future!').

And by "laughably off-target", you of course mean "astoundingly on-target". He wasn't out from under the wing of IBM at the time. That IBM might shrug him off and "do the OS themselves" was not an unassailably improbable concept. So continue sucking up to IBM until, like the proverbial frog in a pot of water, it doesn't recognize the water has gotten too warm.

lots of pundents missed the suddeness of internet

I remember attending Nick Neogroponte's 1995 book tour talk on his book Being Digital, a collection of Wired Magazine columns he wrote. Nick was the founder of the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of Wired magazine which was about internet topics. But his book and magazine bareley mentions the world wide web, Mosaic and Netscape browsers, and the Netscape juggarnaut IPO which occured that same year. I think everyone knew computers would eventually be networked together around the world, this would be available to ordinary citizens, and people would make money off this. But most of them didnt anticipate this would happen in 2-3 short years as early as the 1990s. Even Gates was relatively late to scene, promoting his private AOL-like network. Then on one of his famous retreats (he hides a week or two each year just to catch up on his reading) he had a "St. Paul-like" conversion and embraced the public internet with a vengence. His Internet Explorer became number one browser, perhaps after some shady business practices which caused major governements to sue him.

Bill = Steve Jobs: multiple megahits and failures

Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are long term survivors in an industry where one rarely shines for more than a decade. Each seems to have nutured four or so billion dollar megahits amongst trail of several mediocre products. The PayPal guys are on their second hit with YouTube, but these people are rare.

Everybody Loves Bill Gates

I speak Australian English so an American accent sounds foreign to me. I listened to the recording all the way through but when I realised that he sounded to me just like Ray Romano I found it hard to take him seriously :-)

Re:Sysadmin

If I was said sysadmin I would be changing my numbers right about... now.