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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."

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  1. Re:Shh...poster was being smug! by westlake · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.