Bill Gates in Byte Magazine: The Future of Software Design (1983)
archive.org
archive.org
Today that type of content is almost exclusively in in blogs.
Magazines write about stuff like "The Most Important Agile Trends to Follow in 2020". It's part marketing, influencing kind fluff where people write opinions about soft issues where you can't be clearly right or wrong.
The mainstream ones sure, but there's others out there that don't. At least 2600 still the same.
They're kind of floundering for funding, so if you like that sort of thing, you should probably grab a copy or subscription.
Like there is a whole world of conferences about such things....but miles away from doing...
I love reading old computer magazines and the archive.org collection is amazing. One interesting thing about doing that is that it provides a first hand account of what a lot of the people that worked in the industry thought the future of computing would be like. It is fascinating to compare that view with how it turned out.
I wonder what people 30 years from now with think when they read HN archives?
It mentions:
- ArpaNet can be the future of commerce
- C is the key to portability
- Apple's Lisa introduces a revolutionary UI
Coincidentally, the theme of this August 1983 BYTE is The C Language, with a dozen articles on C.
As always with these wonderful old BYTE magazines, at least skim through the whole thing. The cover art and the ads are a real treat. Hit the Home key and start from there!
They were about 5 years old when I had them, so they talked about the ZX81, TRS-80, and the PCjr.
Everything was already obsolete but they were fun to read. The best was a review of electronic typewriters that could double as a printer for your computer!
I was writing PC software at the time, and I knew I needed to make my programs compatible with the PCjr. The Macy's store in Stanford Shopping Center was one of the few local retailers promising they would have them in stock on the release date. So I called Macy's to reserve one.
When I went there to pick mine up, they said, "oh, we're sorry, we got 10 of them and you were number 11 on the list."
Bullet dodged!
It was probably one of the most useful articles on the topic that I've ever read. Unassuming, and full of direct explanations (and detail).
This is what you were referring to, I'm guessing. 1982.
It didn't really make it into the top 100 of programming books of the 80s/90s, I found it in my grandparents attic. Still, it is a really fascinating read for a young person today. People back then obviously had very different expectations on the future of CS. Even more fascinating I think is the broadness of thinking that programmers were expected to have. The exercises at the end of chapters in this book go further than anything I did during my studies, and while certainly hard, they never feel unfair either.
Gates is famous for completely missing the success of the Internet. He thought that it had no consumer appeal and as a result MS was focused on Office and PC software when the dotcom boom started. His first version of "A Road Ahead" published in 1995 didn't have a chapter about Internet. It was added later.
To his credit he made complete 180 in his opinion in the same year and started to exploit MS monopoly power mercilessly to get ahead.
Gates didn't miss the Internet. The first verst of the book said that the 1994 Internet was not the Internet of the future, and he was right about that. The Web got big in 1995 after Netscape Navigator came out (and Internet Explorer came shortly after). MS was anti web because the browser concept threatened the Windows monopoly as a computing platform. Gates/MS spent they next 5 years desperately trying to lock the Internet inside Windows, with ActiveX etc
He was totally wrong. The future Gates was planning at the time did not include HTML, WWW or internet standards.
It was the Blackbird project and the first version of MSN, a closed subscription-based dial-up online service with Microsoft designed and owned content authoring tools.
Gates' vision of the internet was that people would connect to it once a day - maybe - to download their e-mail to read offline on a desktop PC.
It's why Microsoft went whole hog into Encarta. Gates believed the future of information was subscribing to encyclopedia CDROM updates by mail.
Windows didn't even get networking until 1992, almost a decade after the Macintosh had it.
Interesting. Got any references for that ?
Multiple overlapping windows not useful
They haven't really changed, although they have learned to be less obvious about it.
They set the software world back by 20 years. Before Microsoft, nobody thought computers should just randomly fail all the time. They got people to think it was perfectly normal, and not a reason to send the damn thing back for a refund.
Of course, they're also what you want your competitors to think you're doing, messages to Wall Street or investors, all the other usual things you'd expect from a PR vehicle.
“The promise is that the existing machines could do the job much better-more easily, more efficiently - if software were better designed.”
'Vista 8'