PCMag's Original Interview With Bill Gates From 1981
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pcmag.com
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
I was about 2 months old when DOS came out. 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 ;)
Hindsight is 20/20, but all things considered I think the tech world is in a pretty good place today.
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.
>> 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.
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?
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.