E-mail from Bill (1994) | Hacker News Reader

E-mail from Bill (1994)

newyorker.com

177 pointsjuanplusjuan68 comments

>"BILL GATES, aged thirty-eight, is one of the richest men in the country—the richest in 1992, and the second richest, after the investor Warren Buffett, in 1993, with a fortune of six billion one hundred and sixty million dollars, according to Forbes. "

Very strange that only just 20-25 years ago, the richest people in the world were "only" worth <7,000,000,000

~12 billion inflation-adjusted, but your point stands.

How do you work out 'inflation adjusted' numbers? I've always wondered.

The Fed provides estimates on the devaluation of the dollar over time. You'll find all sorts of other well known institutions and individuals that provide their own formulas however. The spectrum is pretty wide, from those that agree with the Fed's numbers, to people that think the Fed is intentionally significantly understating inflation.

Though it must be said that the latter are cranks who are impossible to take seriously if you look into their claims - basically an MBA who went off the rail with conspiracy theories...

Not just cranks. There are quite a lot of choices as to how you calculate a price index and politics can easily enter in to which choice is taken. I'm not so up on the US index but the UK one tends to weight everyday stuff like the price of a loaf of bread in the supermarket but try coming to London and going to a trendy restaurant and staying in a nice hotel and you'll find those have gone up well above the official rate of inflation.

It's actually (almost certainly for historical reasons) the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) who compute inflation measures, particularly the CPI, but also PPI (consumer and producer price indices, respectively).

http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

It also probably makes sense for the Fed not to compute its own inflation index, as its mandate is to manage inflation (and unemployment). Managing a statistic you control might lead to unintended consequences.

Classic approach would be:

You have an inflation rate (measured through a time series of Consumer Price Indices) for a given timeframe and an initial amount of money. Multiply it.

It's just to compare purchasing power over time.

Expanding with an example... Really you just want to use the index itself. It represents (in theory) the amount you'd pay for a basket of goods.

So say, for example, the Index was at 240 in 1992, but today that same index is 360. So for £100 of 1992 money in today's terms you'd do:

360/240 * 100 = £150

Essentially you just want the ratio of prices for the basket of goods.

That's a great example, thank you. Where do I find the index numbers you refer to? I've googled, but stats are really not my strong point.

Assuming you're in the US, you could look here: http://www.bls.gov/data/#prices

More information here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_price_index), including info about the appropriate US index to use.

Here's a quick overview, along with a calculator:

https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompare/

It would be more interesting to look at their wealth as a percentage of the world's wealth. We have greater output per capita (GDP) today than back then so while the nominal wealth amount may be considered low it's quite possible it was a higher percentage of the world's wealth back then than it is today.

I'm pretty sure this is not the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

There don't seem to be any relevant statistics on that Wikipedia page.

Ah, wrong link, here is a bit more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_Distribution_of_Wealth_...

From your link:

> 1995: top 1% control 38.5% of wealth > 2010: top 1% control 35.4% of wealth

I'm still not following your line of thought?

Look at the numbers for 1980, but you're right, it's not a good example.

My thought is that it's established that there's a percental wealth/income gap that's getting larger, not smaller. It might not be very enlightening to classify just 99% / 1% here, though.

For comparison: US money supply (M2) was $3400 billion in 1992 and it is $12700 billion now.

There's a lot of interesting story in this article, but this sentence caught my eye:

" Our email is completely secure. . . ."

Why would Bill Gates say that? Surely he knew their e-mails were going plain text through a host of providers, network operators and mail relays, or weren't they? Apparently PGP is from 1991, but they are using msmail (judging from the headers) so I don't reckon they were using that.

The movie "Hackers" would come out about a year after that. The cyberpunk genre had been going on a full decade, did Bill really believe no one could read their e-mail? Of course Bill knew about security issues, but was it just not on his mind? Obviously it's not very smart to talk about the sort of thing that is a fundamental threat to business of internet technology to a journalist, but to state outright that it was completely secure seems to be a be going a bit far.

I always wondered why it took so long for Microsoft to develop a proper security story, or even properly developing anything Internet related properly in that time. They could have been twice the company they are now if they took it as serious as this article makes it look Bill took it. Microsoft wasn't anything on the Internet but the company who built your OS and let your mark up your documents for the next ten years after this article.

Read the sentence right before that one where he says no one else reads his email. The implication is that he doesn't have an assistant screening his messages. His email is completely secure in the sense that it's a private one on one conversation, which is to say it's as private as a quiet conversation in a coffee shop or at a park for example. I don't think he is implying it's necessarily secure from hackers and eavesdroppers.

Or he was just wrong.

Maybe the simplest understanding of his statements is that he simply didn't know of what he spoke. Or maybe he was telling a fib. Either of those two options seem more likely than some convoluted debate as to the common understanding of the word "secure".

Well, you could assume he meant "secure" in the same sense as many of us in the industry would interpret it today and conclude that he is a dimwit. Or you could read the sentence right before which gives the context for the use of the word "secure". Reading into any more than that is pure speculation.

> Why would Bill Gates say that? Surely he knew their e-mails were going plain text through a host of providers, network operators and mail relays, or weren't they?

He had to rewrite his 1995 book The Road Ahead to cover the Internet better (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Bill_Gates_b...), so it's entirely possible that he didn't actually know all that much about how email worked in 1994.

That's extremely unlikely. Microsoft had been using email since the late 1980s and Gates was famous for being deep on technical knowledge. Like most, he didn't expect the Web to take off as quickly as it did - that's a completely different matter from understanding how email works.

Back when this article was written, plaintext transport across the internet would not be viewed as nearly the kind of security issue it is today. This wasn't just a shortcoming on Microsoft's part, it was a shortcoming on virtually the entire computer industry - which is, yes, why we are in the situation we're in today. Exactly none of the internet was designed to be secure by modern standards, and vulnerabilities that are obvious today were not obvious 20, 10, and even 5 years ago.

"Around the same time, I read an essay in Wired magazine by Paul Saffo, who is a director of the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park, which argued that the information highway is going to cause a flowering of personal expression not seen in our society since the sixties, and that when this happens (maybe in five years) people whom we now think of as computer nerds will have the same hipness that in retrospect we now assign to beatniks."

Neat, he predicted the emergence of the hipster.

Did they? It seems like people are only interested in the surface of tech, the sexy acquisitions, the new Steve Jobs movie, the new iPhone. And then I try to bring up why password requirements are security theatre and people's eyes gloss over. I've taken to telling people my job description of "works at tech company" and leave it at that.

The anti-password sentiment I've seen sometimes is annoying. They serve their purpose just fine. The worst you get is that password leaks and such happen sometimes and people forget and have to reset them sometimes.

He said 'password requirements' not 'passwords.' I'm assuming he meant the nonsense wherein "you must have a number, lower and upppercase letter, symbol, and a demon-summoning pentagram in your password."

https://xkcd.com/936/

Not hipsters so much as geeks. There's a big difference between a geek and a hipster.

It's amazing to get a 90s perspective on the "information highway". Besides advanced home automation, self-driving cars wonder what types of immature technology we're working on today will just be mainstream in the next 2 decades.

I was a kid in the 90's so I remember keenly the unmistakeable technological shift. People started saying "information highway" an awful lot. And I remember the first time me and my friend used dial up networking to play Doom 2, and I could see his character's movements on my screen in realtime, and I thought, "I am living in the future."

wasn't it "information SUPER-highway"? :)

When I was in 6th grade (~1993), someone's dad came to talk about our class about the "superhighway of information" or the "information highway". It always bugged me that he didn't say "information superhighway".

It always bugged me EVERY time ANYONE every used the term "Information Superhighway" -- and still does.

Marketing people make me want to puke -- that's where terminology like that comes from. Just call it the internet and be done with it already!

Oh, and get off my lawn! xD

It makes me think of watching Zoom on PBS as a little kid. Ask your parents before going online!

you mean the World Wide Web right? The internet is just the backbone.

Does anyone still use "Information Superhighway" anymore? I think most people just say "internet".

However in the 90's that analogy helped many non-technical people understand how to think about the internet. Back then did you have a better analogy?

BTW, as a marketing guy, it always bugs me every time anyone uses the term "marketing" when they mean "advertising". I'm not referring to you/your post but rather a general trend on HN and elsewhere.

When I throw darts at marketing, I mean marketing, not advertising. I know the difference. Nice try though, marketing guy.

As long as you know the difference you can throw all the darts you want.

Well, they were both designed with nukes in mind :)

> will just be mainstream in the next 2 decades

Robotic manufacturing and inventory management (and not just by Toyota and Amazon, nearly all manufacturers and retailers). Productivity related drones. Virtual reality. Artificial intelligence that is very difficult to do without for consumers and businesses (so much so, that the UN will declare it a human right to have access to various AI systems 20 years from now). Commercialized therapies that use CRISPR. Routine tissue repair via stem-cell therapy. Routine organ growing & replacement for less complex organs. Immune system regeneration for those with compromised immune systems. M.S., Parkinson's, alzheimer's, diabetes, HIV, will all be cured except for edge cases (might be closer to 30 years, but some of those will get knocked out in 20, HIV for example).

Indeed. At university in the late 90s. Most people didn't have a PC. Then Napster. Then almost everyone did within the space of 3 years. Lots of tipping points happened.

So perhaps something similar - a tipping point of convenience. What's now on the edge, but could really change a consumption habit? Holograms? 3D printing?

“I like Bill. Bill is a smart guy. But I think the problem is that Microsoft has caught the bunny. You know, when you go to the dog track they have that mechanical bunny that makes the dogs run? Well, sometimes a dog is so fast he catches the bunny and then the other dogs don’t run anymore. That’s the situation in the software business today: Bill has caught the bunny. I admire Bill for catching the bunny, but now we can’t have a race. He ought to be loosed from the bunny, to give the other dogs a chance.” Scott McNealy, the head of Sun Microsystems (Interesting analogy with zero sum game mindset...)

It made me smile that I was reading this in digital form on a computer that fits in my pocket and is always connected to the "information highway".

Still has the same connection issues with telecos being asses just like then though. Or is your connection reliable?

> "The pioneers of personal computers including Jobs, Kapor, Lampson, Roberts, Kaye, are all great people but I don’t think any of us will merit an entry in a history book."

I don't think that will prove true for Mr. Gates or Mr. Jobs.

The list is interesting. Jobs or Gates, of course. Lampson, HNers will probably know from his important CS research such as on distributed systems - he'll be mentioned in those sort of history books, although not generalized ones. Kapor: I have to think for a while before I can finally pin him as 'Mitch Kapor, inventor of the spreadsheet'. Extremely important to business and economics and the modern world, almost as important as double-entry bookkeeping, but I don't think Luca Pacoli or double-entry books are mentioned in most history books so probably not. 'Kaye', I have no idea, unless it's a typo for '[Alan] Kay', in which case he could well be in the history books. Finally, 'Roberts'; I had no idea and had to ask Google, and apparently he's the Altair guy, Ed Roberts. The Altair doesn't seem all that important so I could see history books skipping over it and him. So of the 6 (including Gates himself), 3 probably would be, 2 will be in more specialized histories, and all would be featured in the most detailed histories or encyclopedias (indeed, all of them have Wikipedia entries).

Kapor designed Lotus 1-2-3 (but didn't program it -- both parts were important for its success). Bricklin and Frankston created the spreadsheet with VisiCalc. There are claims of earlier spreadsheets on bigger computers, which I haven't really looked into.

> but I don't think Luca Pacoli or double-entry books are mentioned in most history books so probably not

They did in mine - important factor for the wealth of the Medicis and the northern Italian city states around the 14th/15th century as well as the Hansa league later on. Though I went to school in a European country so YMMV.

Oh, boy, those compuserve numbers were annoying to exchange! I found them difficult to memorize and didn't always have pen and paper around.

The amazing thing was that as late as 1994, Bill Gates had a public email address.

Perhaps. I believe that year is around the time when I first got an email address myself, and if I recall it wasn't another 3-4 years before I knew more than a tiny handful of people who had one as well and used it regularly.

I'm not surprised; I'd be more surprised if it actually went to /dev/null at this point (as opposed to being screened and possibly forwarded for a response.)

As late as 2011, Steve Jobs kept the same public email address: sjobs@apple.com. (There's a collection at http://stevemail.tumblr.com) Some of the replies came within minutes of the originating message, so I wouldn't be surprised if he mostly dealt with the incoming mail himself, as opposed to having it pre-screened. None of those messages are near the length of the Bill Gates replies.

Bezos and Mark Cuban both famously have public email addresses. Cuban actually reads his own email, I suspect Bezos has an assistant screen the public email at this point (he claimed recently on stage at a conference that he reads all of his email, color me skeptical).

> The information highway will be the opposite of this—more like the library of congress but with an easy way to find things.

I thought this line was interesting, seeing as this was before the advent of Google. Bill knew that there needed to be an easy way to find things. MSN search started around the same time as Google, but I believe they used Inktomi rather than develop their own crawler.

Reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg.

You're not the only one.

>Not long ago, Paul Saffo, of the Institute for the Future, said to me, “Bill Gates is an introvert. He is not the kind of person you want building the social network of the future.”

Looks like Saffo got his wish, Gates didn't build it.

Change a few dates and names with the quote bellow and easily fits Zuck.

“Hey, I think the guy is truly dangerous. Bill is the most surprisingly conscience-free individual I’ve ever met, and that amount of power in the hands of a guy without a conscience is dangerous. Big Brother did not happen in 1984, but it could happen in 2004. Ask yourself, ‘If there was to be a technology-oriented dictator by the year 2004, who would he be? Bill Gates?’ ”

There are so many gems in this text :) For example:

> Designing software—or “writing code,” as people in the trade say

I liked Bill's advice on how to speed up meetings:

“Every time you say ‘thirteen,’ I’ll know that what that means is that all you want to do is what the customer wants. And for every one of these other gibberish slogans, we can also get little numbers. There are a lot of small integers available. We’ll just tighten these meetings up. You know, Cannavino, if you want to talk about how you’re going to save the U.S. educational system, okay, we’ve heard that story. That’s a good fifteen-minute one. That can be number eleven.”

Pointers. I like it.

>In Japan, a comic book about the adventures of a boy modelled on Bill Gates is called "Young Jump."

My curiosity has been piqued. Does anyone have a link?

When E-mail was written with a capital E - those were the days!

And a hyphen! :)

> Sender: billg@microsoft.com

Now we know Bill Gates's email address.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com