
E-mail from Bill (1994) - juanplusjuan
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/01/10/e-mail-from-bill
======
a_small_island
>"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

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

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

~~~
adventured
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.

~~~
MagnumOpus
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...

~~~
tim333
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.

------
tinco
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.

~~~
jm4
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.

~~~
sandworm101
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".

~~~
jm4
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.

------
aabajian
"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.

~~~
ben_jones
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.

~~~
jimmaswell
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.

~~~
mojoe
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/](https://xkcd.com/936/)

------
f0under
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.

~~~
increment_i
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."

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

~~~
dtjohnnymonkey
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".

~~~
nocman
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

~~~
maroonblazer
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.

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

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

------
mohsinr
“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...)

------
Viper007Bond
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".

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

------
gcek9
> "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.

~~~
aab0
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).

~~~
MagnumOpus
> 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.

------
burkemw3
Oh, boy, those compuserve numbers were annoying to exchange! I found them
difficult to memorize and didn't always have pen and paper around.

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

~~~
salgernon
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](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.

~~~
adventured
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).

------
LocalPCGuy
> 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.

------
sajid
Reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg.

~~~
maus42
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.

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

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

~~~
tomcdonnell
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.”

~~~
kyllo
Pointers. I like it.

------
Top5a
>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?

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

~~~
somethingsimple
And a hyphen! :)

------
briholt
> Sender: billg@microsoft.com

Now we know Bill Gates's email address.

