Bill Gates Talk From 1989 Surfaces

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."

Comments

Maybe he was taking the party line

[Salvance]

To the computer enthusiasts of the time, it would have been even more laughable had Bill Gates said "in the next two decades, Microsoft software will completely destroy OS/2, will render Apple a shell of its former self by stealing all its innovations, and will demand 1 GB of RAM." So even if he had his world domination plans set in 1989, he couldn't exactly let the world know without being laughed at.

Transcript?

[rgo]

Is there a transcript anywhere? Or at least a summary? I don't have the time to listen to an hour and a half mp3.

Well...

[Xenographic]

You have to admit that it's easier to predict the future when you're the one making it... :]

That said, the places where he was wrong are more interesting to me. I wonder what Microsoft's business plan was had IBM taken over with OS/2 instead of them?

Predictions

[yuriyg]

And yet, by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development. Shouldn't be all that surprising, since he more or less controlled the direction of desktop software development in the 90's. I would assume he just stated his vision of the future of software, and that vision was implemented.

Re:Shh...poster was being smug!

[westlake]

He owes almost his entire fortune to IBM's failure to deliver on OS/2, and (to be fair) Microsoft's successful delivery of DOS+Windows (crap that it was).

Gates began programming at age thirteen, at age fourteen he is clearing $20,000 in is first partnership with Allen. Microsoft is founded in 1975. Microsoft in in Japan in 1978. In Europe in 1979. In 1980 Microsoft is young, hungry, and moving a hell of lot faster than Kildall.

Gates-Quotes from a 1990 interview

[Burlador]

From Chip Magazin 1/1990 (my re-translation from German):

"I think about Handwriting recognition. In two or three years, we may have computers without keyboards. In five or six years this will change, and voice recognition will reduce the importance of graphics."

"In five or six years, DOS [sales] will be overtaken by OS/2."

The he said he is personally using "a Mac II, a Compaq and a IBM" computer, as well as a "NEC-Ultralite".

Re:eComStation still has superior technology

[Richard Steiner]

The thing most people don't realize is that even the 1996 flavor of OS/2 Warp 4 is capable of running modern software like Firefox and OpenOffice, and it does so rather well on fairly limited hardware.

Windows has a hard time doing that these days, and Linux is travelling in that direction (at least in terms of the mainstream distros, which seem to have abandoned legacy hardware support for eye candy).