Gates Donates $15M to Preserve Computing History

Dan-DAFC writes "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is donating the sum of $15 million to the Computer History Museum in California, according to the BBC. The money is the biggest single gift in the museum's $125 million fund-raising campaign, which is still $50 million short of its target. The funds raised will be used to add more exhibits and educational programs."

Comments

Re:Too late for PR stunts BG

[linguae]

I think that most /.ers wouldn't be here if they hadn't been introduced to computers at some point; most people are introduced to computing through Windows.

I don't know if I'd say that, though. Many people's first experience of computers were with DOS (still Microsoft, I know, but not Windows), Apple II, Apple Macintosh, Commodore 64, Amiga, and probably a plethora of other platforms from the late 70s and 1980s that I forgot to mention. And then we have some old-timers here who were introduced to vacuum tubes, punch cards, IBM mainframes, PDP-11s, and some other ancient stuff.

Computers have been around for about 60 years now, and they have been in Joe Average's workplace for about 25. I'm pretty sure that except for the youngest generation, most people have been exposed to computing prior to Windows dominating the market.

School Donations

[lappy512]

The Bill Gates foundation is pretty nice. Even though I support Linux, they have kept our school computers very nice. For example, we recieve upgrades almost every two years, and we just upgraded almost a week ago to 2.8 Celeron D's in our whole school. When our network was only 10BaseT, they helped us upgrade to 100BaseT, speeding login times. Of course, there are the disadvantages, with MSIE only, and Word, but there's always PortableFirefox and PortableOpenOffice!