I’ll declare my bias up front: I work for the guy. He causes the groceries to be paid around here. I even watched the press conference yesterday, so keep that in mind.
Bill Gates is pulling the pin on his career at Microsoft. After founding the joint and making it the primo creator of software on the planet, Bill is retiring from Microsoft to work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full time.
There are some of us who remember the days before this industry existed. Computers were the size of bungalows, had air conditioners the size of Cadillacs and were managed by lab-coated hobbits. Programming took months. Only huge organizations, like StatsCanada, MetLife Insurance or Bell Canada could afford the price to play.
The names on the side of the boxes were IBM, Burroughs, Univac, or Honeywell. Entering a computer room you could feel the power in the air, see the plate steel, painted iron and huge rubber coated cables that fed the monsters. For good reason, mainframes were and still are, called Big Iron in the business. Everything was heavy, strong, and engineered to last decades. I still remember the sound and smell of a 1 Meg hard drive, the size of a washing machine, spinning out and fracturing, at ISC on Walkley Road: Picture a frozen whole elephant being run through God’s Table Saw and you’re close.
Naturally, any thing that was printed out from these behemoths was absolutely true, accurate and completely correct, after all, it was a computer. We all but worshiped them.
Then some long-hairs came up with a Personal Computer. A putty coloured tin box that could sit on your desk and plug into the wall. It could do almost all the things the Big Iron could do, but you had to have certain arcane skills to coax it to life. These skills were passed from user to user on notepaper, or scotch taped to the keyboard. Manuals, if they existed at all, were written for the insane by the insane and weighed several pounds.
Somewhere in there, Bill Gates and a few other unindicted co-conspirators came up with the idea of a computer on the desk and the tools to make it possible. Bill is not the father of the PC, or the father of software. However, he was the one with the vision that said just about everyone could have one and be able to use it to do things.
In my lifetime an entire industry was created and injected into society at nearly every level. The computer you’re using now to read this, is connected to a massive network of other computers passing 0’s and 1’s along copper wires, glass fibers and radio waves so we can talk, read, write, play, connect, conduct business, earn money, download porn, or listen to music.
Computers themselves have also changed: My cellphone, which contains a computer and a lot of software, has more memory and raw computational grunt than the computers that took Apollo 11 to the Moon and back to Earth.
Bill might have run a company best described as occasionally predatory, or confused, or brilliant; sometimes all of those things at the same time. He might be wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. He might also be willing to share significant portions of that money with the less fortunate. You can’t minimize the things the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have done.
At the end of the day, however, he helped create an entire industry that has winkled its way into just about every aspect of modern life. Not many people can say that.
RoadDave 