

PCMag's Original Interview With Bill Gates From 1981 - adeelarshad82
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389282,00.asp

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garyrichardson
What a great interview. Say what you will about Microsoft, Bill Gates is a
smart, smart man.

There are so many great quotes in there. Considering the time the interview
took place, he did a great job of anticipating what was coming:

    
    
      * transition of interesting jobs from hardware -> software
      * user experience becoming more important than performance
      * the importance of networking
    

Well worth the read.

I was about 2 months old when DOS came out. Can't imagine where I'd be without
the PC revolution.

~~~
pornel
> Can't imagine where I'd be without the PC revolution.

Probably it wouldn't be much different. The revolution would have happened
anyway, but with Apple, Atari, Amiga or someone else.

And perhaps multitasking GUI OSes would be mainstream 5-10 years earlier ;)

~~~
kenjackson
BUT, a big thing in favor of MS is that DOS/Windows didn't sit on proprietary
HW. Apple/Atari/Commodore were all proprietary systems. I'm not sure if we
would have seen the rapid rise of video cards in any of those systems.

Hindsight is 20/20, but all things considered I think the tech world is in a
pretty good place today.

~~~
pornel
IBM PC was proprietary as well. "IBM PC-compatible" clones with reverse-
engineered BIOS were made _despite_ IBM, not thanks to them.

~~~
kenjackson
But the OS was licensed to IBM. MS could sell it to any HW vendor. The HW,
with respect to the OS, wasn't proprietary. The MacOS wasn't simply licensed
to run on Macs, it was built by Apple to only run on Macs. Despite some toe
dips, there never any attempt to really license it.

The _mistake_ IBM made wasn't the HW. It was that they let MS license them the
OS on a non-exclusive basis. A genius move when you consider it -- most people
would have had little belief there'd be a huge MS-DOS market once IBM entered
the fold.

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jefffoster
Interesting! The single page view is at
[http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=278114,00.asp?h...](http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=278114,00.asp?hidPrint=true)

~~~
sgoraya
Fun read - I especially liked the last statement of the interview:

>> Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering. When you
finally get done and get to appreciate what you have done it is like a part of
yourself that you've put together. I think a lot of the people here feel that
way.

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btcoal
"But, I'll just mention two things that are critical in Multiplan.

The first is the use of naming. You are not put into a mode where you have to
use "A10," "B9," "C14," and things like that, which you have to do with
VisiCalc. If you want to say that taxes are 6% of sales then you say "taxes
are .06 times sales." If you want the sum of all the profits you say "SUM
(Profit)" and so we deal with data on a name basis which is the way people are
used to dealing with it."

Am I the only one that would love to see this impleneted in spreadsheet
software today?

~~~
supabill
It is there in Excel and Google Docs already :)

~~~
btcoal
Guh. Right you are: named ranges
(<http://www.contextures.com/xlnames01.html>).

I learned about this feature years and years ago and never used it. Maybe it
wouldn't actually be all that helpful afterall. If only I could downvote
myself.

