50 years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft. In 1993, Gates told the BBC about the innovations that would define the 21st century.
When the BBC broadcast an interview with Bill Gates in June 1993, there were only 130 web pages in the world. The Air Force Horizon science programme studied the electronic frontier and concluded that information was beginning to redefine our world, its geography and economy.
Then in an interview with the programme Gates said:
At the time, technology was offered to send a cheque for £2 and receive a text transcript of an interview in the post.
At that time the computer industry had already expanded faster than any other in history. But the key to future profits was to create something small and easy to use. The programme then asked Gates: “Do we need so much information, or should they (technology firms) just sell it to us?”
In a world where a website list of all the world’s websites could fit on two pages, we haven’t even mentioned the online -patties from individual sites. But as it looks, the ideas expressed in the programme were ahead of their time.
In the early years of Microsoft’s founding, Bill Gates and Paul Allen set a goal: every home and table should have a computer. And everything, of course, should be Microsoft software.
They met more kids – both studied at a public school in Seattle, both fascinated by computers. Both went to college and threw it into creating Microsoft, which was so named because the company was supposed to provide software with microcomputers.
Photo by the author, Getty Images
The breakthrough came in 1980 when Microsoft. To produce IMM, at the time the largest computer company in the world.
A brilliant business proposition was the agreement that Microsoft could provide operating system licences to manufacturers whose personal computers were compatible with ICM, which depended on their MS-DOS software products
. To this day.
Author photo, Getty Images
, with Gates playing the role of the serious computer and Allen as its relaxed older brother.
Allen worked at Microsoft by 1983 and left the occasions as he was diagnosed with blood cancer. He was cured and became a successful venture capitalist. And because he also kept his stake in Microsoft stock, he kept appearing on lists of the richest people in the world – until his death in 2018 at the age of 65.
He spent wealth on his passion, funding the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team as well as the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, who won the 2013 Super Bowl
. Legendary music producer Jonesy once told Allen, “Sings and plays like (Jimmy) Gundrix.”
“I floated on his yah -doodles!” – he said in an interview.
Allen left the company before products such as Windows, Excel and Word were on computers in every office and home.
By the early 1990s, Gates’ vision of how computers should work quickly sales and profits. But the core dream of business partners about how Microsoft equipped computers on every spreadsheet only half appeared.
Photos by the author, Reuters
Word and Ikelevski were helpful.
The next step was bringing multimedia technology into every home, when every personal computer became a means of communication. It was the same world of leisure that Allen loved so much, but there was a gateway to provide it in every home.
A thousand television channels and nothing to watch
, as Gates recognised in a 1993 BBC interview, to win over the home audience. But he was convinced Microsoft could pull it off.
“If you take a time frame of 15, especially 20 years, every home will indeed be a computer, although it won’t look like it does now,” Bill Gates said.