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Bill Gates Talk From 1989 Surfaces

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hard-to-make-predictions-especially-about-the-future dept.

70sstar writes "A 1-1/2 hour recording of Bill Gates addressing a crowd of university students in 1989 was recently found and digitized, and has been circulating in some IRC channels for the past few weeks. The speech has found a permanent home on the web page of the University of Waterloo CS Club, where the talk is reported to have taken place. Gates covers the past, present, and future of computing as of 1989. While the former two might be of interest to tech historians, the real fascination is Gates's prediction of computing yet to come. Like the now-legendary '640k' remark, some of his comments are almost laughably off-target ('OS/2 is the way of the future!'). And yet, by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development. All in all, a fascinating talk from one of the most powerful speakers in CS and IT."

3 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Transcript? by tb3 · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    I have the time to listen to a 1.5 hour mp3. I just don't have the stomach to listen the an hour and a half of Gates' nasally, whiney voice.
    Seriously.
    I can barely stand to listen to the man for 30 seconds. God have pity on his underlings. (Or his wife. )

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  2. Re:OS/2... by bobbonomo · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    From what I read, MS sabotaged OS/2 by writing inefficient code (on purpose). The code from England was good. Otherwise we would have had a multi-tasking OS way before 1995 (or should I say 1999 for 2K). No proof of this. Could be just folklore but I was there then and it makes sense.

    Virtual machines. OS/2 had it. Well sort of. More like their VM/370 or MVS. Multiple independent address spaces, managed by a "hypervisor", that could or nor see each other. On an 80486 PC and not a mainframe.

  3. Re:OS/2... by Gr8Apes · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    OS/2 ran in VMs, hence the issues with the Win32s and Office95. THe VMs were restricted to 512MB. Office95 asked for mem at the 2GB mark upon startup, at a time when most systems had less than 256MB. Why? Because it would break OS/2 support.

    D/SOM was awesome technology. Enabled more functionality than was supplied by DCOM years later, and did so reliably. It's 2007 and D/COM still doesn't work right.

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