the average family home. cory practices her violin. christian plays with his cars. and mike and carol worry over the bills. we went into the 1980s in pretty much the same technology that s been in place for a couple of decades. typewriter. calculators, tv, oven. a car. you listen to music on a big old stereo system with a turntable. maybe you had a digital watch, and that was the only thing that was going to be digital that you actually owned. hello? i m not here now, but my faithful machine is. there was a handful of technology at that time. one was the telephone answering machine. you d be driving home and you d say, i can t wait to check my messages. you know, it had become part of the day. honey, i m checking my messages. from the noisy streets of new york to the laid-back tranquility of california, americans are tuning out and tuning in. when i think of technology in the 1980s, i think of the walkman. the walkman was huge. it s the latest fad. tiny st
the average family home, cory practices her violin, christian plays with his cars and mike and carol worry over the bills. we went in with pretty much the same technology that s been in place for a couple of decades. typewriter. calculators. tv. oven. a car. you listen to music on a big old stereo system with a turntable. maybe you had a digital watch and that was the only thing that was going to be digital that you actually owned. hello? i m not here now but my faithful machine is. there was a handful of technology at that time. one was the telephone answering machine. you would be driving home and you would say i can t wait to check my messages. you know, it becomes part of the day. honey, i m checking my messages. from the noisy streets of new york to the laid-back tranquility of california, americans are tuning out and tuning in. when i think of technology in the 1980s, i think of the walkman. the walkman was huge. it s the latest fad. tiny stereo casset
operating system for your pc, and we ll get a cut of every machine you sell. and in addition, he made sure that it was not an exclusive license. that he was going to be able to sell this software to ibm, but he was also going to be able to sell the same software to the other people. because gates intuited that there were going to be people that would build knockoffs of ibm and the pc clones. it was a genius move on the part of bill gates, who was still in his early 20s when he made this decision. and you ve got these guys at ibm in their blue shirts and dark ties looking at this company microsoft and saying like, who cares? software, who cares about software? man, we build these big machines. ibm did not realize it was essentially handing all this power to this little nerd. if you had stayed at harvard a few more years, would this computer revolution have passed you by? perhaps. things move very quickly in the industry, and it was really the urgency to get out there and be the
so when gates said to ibm how about this, we ll write you an operating system for your pc and we will get a cut of every machine you sell, and in addition, he made sure that it was not an exclusive license, that he was going to be able to sell this software to ibm but he was also going to be able to sell the same software to the other people because gates intuited that there were going to be people who would build knock offs of ibm, the pc clones. it was a genius move on the part of the bill gates who was still in his early 20s when he makes this decision. you ve got these guys at ibm in their blue suits and dark ties who are looking at this company, microsoft, saying who cares? software, who cares about software, man. we build these big machines. ibm did not realize that it was essentially handing all this power to this little nerd. if you had stayed at harvard a few more years, would this computer revolution have passed you by? perhaps. things move very quickly in the industr
man, we build these big machines. ibm did not realize it was essentially handing all this power to this little nerd. if you had stayed at harvard a few more years, would this computer revolution have passed you by? perhaps. things move very quickly in the industry, and it was really the urgency to get out there and be the first one to put a basic on the microcomputer that caused me to drop out. if you don t have one, you will be amazed what these little gadgets can do. the idea was that ordinary people might have a use for computers. now, it took a while to figure out what those uses might be. the main thing was spreadsheets and word processing. the computer was the best typewriter you could ever have. it gave you a new way to write. you could change things around. and check your spelling. it would always look perfect. my dad had the large ledger sheets, done them all by hand, and i remember taking a computer to show him the spreadsheet. and suddenly, he understood the va