Bill Gates Interview (1993)
americanhistory.si.edu
americanhistory.si.edu
When I was at high school in the early 80's I did exactly that with the "business response" card that came with Byte magazine. Then one day, whilst at school, my parent's phone started ringing regularly during the day with calls from sales folks following up and enquiring if I'd received their sales literature, etc. My poor old folks had to explain on numerous occasions that I was just a school kid and that it'd be unlikely I'd be purchasing whatever $10000 dollar disk subsystem/S100 Bus Chassis/Pick System/etc I'd randomly enquired about, and apologised for the inconvenience caused :)
It's from 1995, and he talks about how internet will become etc etc. It is mind blowing how spot on he is right on his vision, perfectly describing the iphone and other things we use today and didn't exist at this time.
Sometime I wonder how Microsoft became so wrong on so many things despite such a clear vision of what the future became.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_boo...
> we were pushing the idea of multimedia back in 1986 that didn't really catch on, you could say, until 1994 so before it was in the mainstream.
According to Randall E. Stross, not everyone saw CD-ROM's rise as a medium either: https://books.google.com/books?id=jrKwMK3raXoC&pg=PA71&lpg=P...
According to Stross above, even though Mac was technically advance, Sculley & Apple (Jobs left in 85'), missed out on the CD-ROM evolution as a trojan horse into the Home market (so did Manzi & Lotus). Microsoft (Robert Glaser) worked with PC, chips, and manufactures and faced many hurdles. I guess the breakthrough came when 486 came out.
As a teenager the mid-nineties, I remember how CD-ROM was this huge leap from floppy disks & cassettes—that's almost 8+ years after the first CD-ROM Conference. Right when CD-ROM is in full swing (1994), another medium was taking shape. The pace of format evolution picked up after that; from CD-ROM & multimedia to the Internet & multimedia—was something that definitely left Microsoft in the wake and gave rise to a sleuth of other powerhouse.
Looking back now, how Steve Jobs bet on MP3 and the Internet as another trojan horse into the Home market (for hand-held devices) makes everything comes full circle—took a page from Microsoft—no wonder why Gates was impressed.
* EDIT: grammatical & add commentary on 486
As far as the internet goes, it makes the case that Bill Gates saw the future, but not the immediate one. This left ground for Netscape to enter and momentarily control the Web.
I'd rather use Bill Gates' own words from D5 in 2007: "And [Steve Job's] ability to always come around and figure out where that next bet should be has been phenomenal."
State that 20 yrs later we are at the beginning for a lucky minority of earth population, but non-the-less right on target !
Here's a copy of Gary Kidall's autobiography: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/in-his-own-words-gary-k...
1, 2, 3, 95, 98 NT, 2000, 7, 8, 10.
It's against the HN guidelines to use the title and URL fields of a submission to express which detail you think is important about an article. That cherry-picking is a form of editorializing. It frames the discussion in a biased way, which is not allowed on HN. Here we want readers to make up their own minds.
If you'd like to express what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but please do it by posting a comment to the thread. That way your view will be on the same level as anyone else's. On HN (unlike some other social news sites!) being the submitter of an article confers no special right to interpret or frame it for others.
(This case seems well-intentioned, not abusive, but it's a point we've learned to insist on.)
As for whether the rule itself is too strict, I really don't think so. It's rooted in long experience of what keeps this place relatively substantive, and like a number of HN's rules goes deeper and has subtler side effects than one would suppose. The principle of remaining neutral with respect to content, presenting it in a way that invites readers to make up their own minds, serves HN well. Underlying that are the principles that the reader is smart enough to do so, that it's good to ask the reader to work a little, and an emphasis on the content itself rather than the submitter.
That's not to say we never make exceptions, but the OP is a good example of where we wouldn't, hence my comment.
In any case, dang was more than reasonable in his explanation and even included OP's original title and link for those who were curious. It seems like a good teaching opportunity.
It's a bit like Wikipedia or Stackoverflow. More and more "rules" get set up independent of the community, but "for the greater good".
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
This paragraph has been there as far as I can remember.
To help others follow this guideline, how about a small change to the design of the Submit page? Instead of title, maybe the first text box could be labeled original title. Or maybe add the note, "Please use original page title" after the text box.