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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."
You do know that the NT4 core is extremely similar to OS/2, and the only reason they diverged is because of a fight between IBM and MS?
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.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Don't interfere with Bill-Bashing!
If I was said sysadmin I would be changing my numbers right about... now.
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.
I really do only need 640k. As long as I can play Scramble on my Vic 20 I'll be happy for life.
Task Mangler
Like the now-legendary '640k' remark
A better description would have been the "mythical '640k' remark", because he never said it.
Nobody can ever cite a source for this alleged quote, and in the absence of such a source, you have to take his word for it. It's impossible to prove a negative; that's how urban legends start in the first place.
(If he did say it, don't you think someone would have figured out the where and when?)
Most geeks' dress sense hasn't changed much since 1989 ;)
What kind of business are you in?
We predict the future. The best way to predict the future... is to invent it.
-X-Files
...for Duke Nukem Forever.
1-1/2 hour = 30 minutes
Oh wait...
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?
I was a fledgling member of the CSC at Waterloo, and I recognize the members in the photos they showed. I also remember attending this talk with a front row seat. I was sort of unimpressed because he didn't discuss anything that was new or that I didn't already know about.
It was called "The Road Ahead", originally published in 1995. My recollection was that he got some things right, but he speculated that a new information superhighway would come along to replace the Internet. He also predicted that many/most of us would be interacting with their computers via handwriting and voice recognition.
It says a lot about /. these days. During the days of Olsen, he started a re-write of VMS. It had such luminaries as Cutler and Bell on the team. When the company was bleeding, Olsen killed off this project and others. When Gates got wind of this, he approached Cutler (and others such as Grey and Bell), and convinced him to join him. One of the bigger issues was that he promised the core to the VMS folks. He would control the API and above. They would control the core.
ANd if that was not enough, back in 94, I even saw the code for NT (I worked at HP and a neighboring group were asked to port it to the pa-risc. ). I can tell you firsthand that it had NOTHING to do with OS2. If you looked at it, you knew it was dec derivitive. Even the comments said it all.
So how did you get modded up?
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".
" And yet, by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development."
Yeah? Gee, if he was once such a savant, what happened between then and his 1995 book "The Road Ahead" where he totally fails to "predict" the Internet and World Wide Web when it had already happened?
Sorry, but reciting some corrollary to Moore's Law does not count as accurate prophesy, 'chilling' or otherwise. It's just conventional wisdom
What legendary rock-n-roll song was used at the gala release celebration for OS/2? Oh, that's right, there was no celebration. OS/2's number one reason for failing was that IBM didn't make much of an effort to make it a success.
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).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Funny you should bring up the Road Ahead. Its interesting to compare the differences between the first and second editions of that book. The Internet "exists" in the second version.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
He's the richest dude in the world and his OS is on almost every PC in the world, but let's laugh that he predicted something wrong in 1989! Hahaha, that totally evens things out.
Gee, I feel better for me now.
Everyone cares about these fabulous corrections and technicalities. Keep it coming, it's really bitchin'.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
I'm top-posting this instead of replying to individual posts because there are just so many posts with one conspiracy theory or another. Microsoft tricked IBM into taking OS/2, Microsoft made Office 95 break OS/2, etc. etc.
I worked at Microsoft from 1990 to 1996, and during part of that time I worked on Microsoft Word. And I'm here to tell you: Microsoft really believed in OS/2, back in the day. They really thought it would be the future.
In 1990, I got an OS/2 machine on my desk, as did the other folks around me, because we all knew OS/2 was the future. The MS library had OS/2 machines for looking up books (and as far as I remember, the MS library had only OS/2 machines). And all the major MS apps were shipped for OS/2: Word, Excel, etc. (But they were also shipped for Windows. MS covered all the bets.)
Now, I was only a lowly developer, not a strategy architect, and I never ate lunch with Bill Gates, so it's possible there was some amazing subterfuge going on without me knowing. But I don't believe it.
Here is my summary of what happened, based on what I saw then, and on various articles I read in PC Week, Infoworld, etc.
Microsoft started developing Windows back in the 80's. The early Windows was a laughingstock in the industry: it was a primitive toy. Apple seriously jump-started their GUI efforts by building a closed platform and tailoring their GUI specifically for that platform; Microsoft was hobbled by the suckiness of the 8088 and awful graphics adapters like the CGA card. MS actually tried to get Windows to run on that sort of pathetic hardware. Windows 1.0 did run but no one wanted it.
MS doesn't give up easily. They kept plugging away at Windows, and it started to suck less, as the machines got more powerful. Also, IBM and Microsoft decided to cooperate on a new OS: OS/2.
Microsoft wanted to make OS/2 as compatible as possible with Windows, to make it easy to port applications. IBM wanted to make OS/2 "better" than Windows. (My memory is dim here, I don't remember specifically why it was better to be incompatible with Windows. Compatible with some graphics API that IBM already had?) So now, the plan was to sell Windows only until OS/2 conquered the world. But the Windows guys kept plugging away on Windows, even as the OS/2 guys did their thing.
Around the time I was hired, Microsoft and IBM were telling customers that basically if you have lame hardware, go ahead and run Windows on it, but if you have good hardware, you want OS/2 because that is the future. (IIRC the decision point was: if you have less than two megabytes of RAM, run Windows.)
Then, in 1990, Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0... and everyone, including Microsoft, was stunned by how well it sold. It flew off the shelves. Egghead (at the time, a successful brick-and-mortar chain of computer stores) sent trucks with ice cream over to Microsoft; along with everyone else, I had a free ice cream bar to celebrate the success of Windows 3.0.
The key feature was actually that it ran DOS apps very well. You could have multiple DOS shells open at the same time, and it would multitask them well (pre-emptive multitasking, even though Windows itself used round-robin multitasking for Windows apps at the time!). You could even have a DOS app crash, and your other DOS apps would keep running just fine. Compare with the "compatibility box" in OS/2, which was usually called the "Chernobyl Box" by geeks because a misbehaving DOS app could take down your whole machine. The Chernobyl Box could only run a single DOS app at a time.
Why? Why was Windows 3.0 better than OS/2? Because at the time OS/2 was written only to support the 286, and even if you ran it on a 386 it would just run in 286 mode. Windows 3.0 would only do the cool DOS app multitasking if you ran it on a 386. My understanding is that IBM promised, early on, that OS/2 would run great on a 286; and IBM felt it was seriously important to keep that promise. With hindsight, I
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
It's this kind of lack of foresight that made the whole x86 architectue crappy.
The question is not only what is realistic to do now and what would be not be possible to buy/build.
The question is, if this architecture hangs around for the next couple of decade what will you be happy to have taken account for ? What could be useful for future generations of machines ?
The 68k has been designed on purpose to have a clean architecture, that could easily evolve in future machine without needing hacks. (32 bits internal, even if first versions had 16bit bus. Flat memory addressing, etc.)
The x86 has been a long series of very short-sighted choice (because nobody tougth it could last) - like the "640k ought to be enough for everyone" (it was back then, it wasn't any more a couple of years later) or the ackward instruction set - and subsequent hacks to circumvent the limitations (the whole segmentation logic is a pain in the ass). Not to say about all legacy modes that current chips still drag around (your Core 2 is still binary compatible with 8088 code and assembly compatible with 8080 code). Intel has tried to restart something completly new and supposedly better with the Itanium, but it failed, mainly because of all this legacy. AMD was somewhat more successful with AMD64 (because it both has a nice new clean x86-64 extension and support for all the ackwrd legacy).
It's only sad that the x86 was chosen for the IBM PC, a computer whose architecture was subsequently opened and copied by numerous clones that IBM chose to tolerate, which made this architecture popular and made it evolve very quickly.
Whereas the 68k regularly ended up in very nice machines (Amiga, Macintosh, etc.) but whose parent company never accepted to open. And thus remained less popular (because of higher price and lower development by 3rd parties).
At least the 68k had much more success in video games (consoles and arcades. MegaDrive and NeoGeo if i have to only site two).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Imagine you have the only Mercedes-Benz dealership, every morning customers are lined up, check-books ready. Year after year. You are rich beyond imagination.
Then one day this fellow shows up with a Vespa and says, "You should sell these Vespa scooters too.."
What do you do..?
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Political discussion for a new world
Spot on. In addition, if Linus or some such had made a couple of conventional wisdom statements that stood up a decade down the line, it would be "brilliantly" or "insightfully"; since it's BG, it's "chillingly".
IBM got a number of things right, prior to the release of the original IBM Personal Computer. I was working in a computer store at the time, in 1981, working in both sales and service. I was sent to Boca Raton in the first wave of salespeople and technicians for training on the as-yet-unannounced "IBM PC". I was unusual in that I was sent to both week-long classes, because the company couldn't decide whether I was a salesman or a service tech.
... even the best products still have to be useful, and still have to be marketed. Commodore never really figured that out.
It was a very interesting week. One question that came up early was, "that's great, but is it going to be another Apple ][, where we have to try and sell people a computer that won't do anything unless they write their own software?" Yes, I know, at that point the Apple ][ was already well-established but when it was first released it really had little application support. However, the IBM folks pointed to a shelf full of business software that they had already had ported to their new machine. BPI and Peachtree accounting, a couple of word processors and a bunch of other stuff. Smart, very smart.
So, in combination with the magic letters IBM and plenty of common business apps including mainframe terminal emulation, it was hard not to sell the things. And this was when the only video out available was the IBM Monochrome Display and Printer Adapter! The original CGA card followed fairly quickly but we still sold a ton of those things with just the original green monochrome text-only display. It was all that businesses needed back then.
The Apple grew out of the needs of the original hacker community, where everyone wrote their own software, and developed into a serviceable business system because developers jumped on-board and provided the applications software. IBM recognized this need, and made sure that there were enough good apps out for the PC before they even announced its existence. Some of them were rough ports, in a couple of cases obvious conversions from well-known Apple ][ software. But that didn't matter: business wanted an IBM computer system and it had programs that worked. End of story.
I worked at a game development house in the mid-eighties: that company developed the original graphics demonstration that was shipped with every Commodore Amiga. I didn't get to write code for it, as a matter of fact it had no native development tools and the two guys that were coding for it had to work on a couple of Sparcs (the two machines were in a room with an electronic lock, nobody was allowed in, all very hush-hush.) The prototype Amiga 1000's came in hand-built plywood cases, and didn't even have a power-on/reset circuit.
Anyway, as impressive a platform as the Amiga was, from both a hardware and operating system perspective, it suffered from a distinct lack of applications and an even more distinct lack of marketing. Commodore could have taken the lead and blown everyone else out of the water, but they apparently made the mistake of assuming that technological superiority would carry the day. It didn't then, and it doesn't now
I remember their one TV ad, where the sonorous announcer's voice said, "Only Amiga makes it possible." Makes what possible. The ad didn't say, and really was more confusing than anything else.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Windows 3.0 was, at the time, prettier than OS/2, friendlier than OS/2, nimbler than OS/2, ran on small configurations than OS/2, was more compatible than OS/2... and shipped with about a dozen nice little applets like Windows Write that OS/2 didn't ship with. ToolBook, too, if I remember correctly.
The applets, are for me, the proof. If Microsoft believed OS/2 was the future, why couldn't it spare a few developers to put some of the trimmings on it that would make it appeal to non-corporate users?
Microsoft devoted what must have been significant resources to making Windows 3.0 more appealing than OS/2. Why should it have been "stunned" when it sold better than OS/2?
Maybe the parts of the company that were working on OS/2 believed it was the future, when the higher-ups had really placed their bets somewhere else. Things like that happen in big companies.
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