When the BBC first issued an interview with Bill Gates, co -founder of Microsoft, in June 1993, it was thought that there were only 130 websites in total. The Horizon scientific program, of the BBC, investigated the new “electronic border”, in an era in which “information begins to redefine our world, its geography and its economy.”
Gates told the program: “This is the information era and the computer is the tool of the information era and software is what will determine the ease with which we can access all that information.”
TVs could send a US $ 2.5 check and receive a transcription of the program by mail.
The program was asked: “Do we need endless information, or do you just need to sell it?”
In a world where a list of almost all websites entered two sides of a sheet of paper, the world wide web (or World Computer Rede) did not even receive a mention. However, the ideas explored in the program are very advanced to their time.
The computer industry had already grown faster than any other in history, but the key to future benefits was to create something portable and easy to use.
At the beginning of Microsoft, Bill Gates and Paul Allen set the goal of having a computer on each desk and in each house, with Microsoft products, of course.
They met children in a private school in Seattle, where they discovered that they shared the love for computers. Both went to university, but they abandoned it and created Microsoft, called because it offered software For microororders.
The great opportunity of the company came in 1980, when Microsoft agreed to produce the operating system for the personal computer that IBM was developing, the world’s main computer company at that time.
In a coup of business genius, Microsoft achieved permission to grant operating system licenses to other manufacturers, generating a personal computer industry “compatible with IBM” that depended on their MS-DOS product. The money had begun to enter and, today, it has not stopped yet.
While Gates was the serious mentality computer, Allen was his eccentric older brother. Allen worked in Microsoft until 1983, when he turned away from the first line after being diagnosed with blood cancer. He recovered to become a successful venture capital investor and, after conserving his part of the company, was a fixed in the world’s lists until his death in 2018 at 65.
Allen used his enormous fortune to invest in his personal passions. He owned the Basketball team Portland Trail Blazers and the NFL Seattle Seahawks team, which won the Super Bowl in 2013.
His Microsoft departure also allowed him to have more time to perfect his practice with the guitar. The legendary music producer Quincy Jones came to affirm in an interview for a magazine that Allen “sings and plays the same as Hendrix.”
“I was traveling on his yacht, and I had David Crosby, Joe Walsh, Sean Lennon … Then, the last two days, Stevie Wonder came with his band and made Paul go up to play with him: it’s good,” said Jones.
The design of the Pop Museum of Seattle, which he founded, was compared to a shattered guitar and was created by the superstar architect Frank Gehry.
Allen left Microsoft before products like Windows, Excel and Word arrived at homes and offices around the world. In the early 90s, Gates’ vision of computers connected to the network fired sales and benefits.
However, both of both of putting a computer with software Microsoft in each home and company was halfway.
The processing of texts and spreadsheets were lucrative, but the incessant eagerness for Microsoft expansion needed new worlds to explore.
The next step was to bring multimedia services to homes, turning the personal computer into a communication device. It was the world of leisure so dear to Allen that Gates needed to explode.
1,000 TV channels and nothing to see
Gates recognized the BBC in 1993 that “the home will be a more difficult border to conquer.” However, I hoped that Microsoft would get it. “If we look at a period of 15 or 20 years, I have no doubt that the vision of a computer in each home, although it does not look like the current computer, will come true,” he said.
A year earlier, Bruce Springsteen had published a success in which he complained about having “57 Channels (and nothin ‘on)” (in Spanish, “57 channels and nothing to see”. Without being intimidated by the cynicism of Spingsteen, Nathan Myhrvold, of Microsoft, spoke of a future in which we would have up to 1,000 television channels.
“It may seem like a nightmare, but I think it’s something wonderful. Imagine what your favorite library would be like if there were only five books,” he said.
And described a system similar to the current services of streaminghe spoke of an “online interactive guide, which uses computer technology to organize the channels, showing them on topics, even learning from the material you like to see, and then present it directly on the TV.”
Myhrvold offered a tempting vision of the future: a world at the reach of the hand in which a CD of the group in Vogue or tickets for Prince instantly could be requested. But what would this mean for personal privacy?
Denise Caruso, editor of the Digital Media magazine, warned in the 1993 program:
“The ease of sitting in front of an interactive TV in five years and being able to ask for something by pressing the remote control means that the information about one goes through a network. That means whoever is on the other side of that network knows what you are watching on television, you can get the number of your credit card, you can know many things about you that you may not want you to know.”
Caruso raised problems echoing the current debate on the generative the AI models that are trained by devouring copyright material.
“By converting information into a merchandise, the way people think about ideas, their work and what they do. I am a writer are really changed. My trade are the ideas, and when it is tried another, ”said the editor.
Although the information is an incredible good, he added, he has no value unless he can protect himself. But how to protect something that does not exist physically and that can be copied or modified undetectable?
“The problem is that the solutions are as complex as the problems themselves. Do you want to enclose all the information? Not at all. There would be no scientific progress if scientists could not freely exchange ideas and information. Do you mean that all the information is free?” Caruso said and added:
“Well, you can’t do that either because people make a living with the fruit of their work, which is the information, be it a book, a movie or music. I think that technology is something incredible and very powerful, but it is in both ways, and it is very important that we all understand it before hugging it without further ado.”
The birth of email
Although the World Wide Web It did not appear in the program, it was the first introduction for many spectators to the email concept, or email. While Microsoft continued its voracious expansion, the company’s vice president of the company, Mike Murray, said that email “creates an electronic village [que] It allows us to transcend the borders of time or geographical barriers. ”
His words may seem grandiloquent now, but at that time it would have been a revolutionary idea that one could communicate instantly with someone or many people on the other side of the world without the need for a expensive international phone call.
At the end of 1993, the number of sites web It was estimated at 623, having doubled every three months. At the end of 1994, the figure was 10,022.
Some commentators considered that Microsoft took to recognize the possibilities and growth of the webbut in May 1995 Gates sent a memorandum to his managerial staff entitled “The Maremoto of the Internet”, in which he described him as “the most important advance since the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981”.
Three months later, Microsoft launched its portal web MSN together with the launch of Windows 95. Some versions included the new Internet Explorer browser. The future was at stake again, and Gates had great ideas again on how to conquer it.