Submission + - Mysterious Bill Gates Recording Tracked Down
Mitchell Bogues writes: A 1-1/2 -hour recording of Bill Gates addressing a crowd of university students in the late '80s was recently found and digitised, and has been circulating the IRC channels for the past few weeks. While no one really seems to know exactly where the talk took place or who first put it online, the speech seems to have found a permanent home on the web page of the University of Waterloo CS Club.
The talk itself covers the past, present, and future of computing as of 1989. While the former two can be interesting to the high-tech historian, the real star is Bill Gates' prediction of computing yet to come. Like his legendary '640k' line, some of Gates' remarks are almost laughably off-mark ('OS/2 is the way of the future,' for one); and yet, by and large, he seems to have accurately prophesied an entire decade or two of soft- and hardware development. All in all, a fascinating talk from, it seems, one of the most powerful speakers in CS and IT.
The talk itself covers the past, present, and future of computing as of 1989. While the former two can be interesting to the high-tech historian, the real star is Bill Gates' prediction of computing yet to come. Like his legendary '640k' line, some of Gates' remarks are almost laughably off-mark ('OS/2 is the way of the future,' for one); and yet, by and large, he seems to have accurately prophesied an entire decade or two of soft- and hardware development. All in all, a fascinating talk from, it seems, one of the most powerful speakers in CS and IT.