E-mail from Bill (1994)

&gt;&quot;BILL GATES, aged thirty-eight, is one of the richest men in the country—the richest in 1992, and the second richest, after the investor Warren Buffett, in 1993, with a fortune of six billion one hundred and sixty million dollars, according to Forbes. &quot;<p>Very strange that only just 20-25 years ago, the richest people in the world were &quot;only&quot; worth &lt;7,000,000,000

There&#x27;s a lot of interesting story in this article, but this sentence caught my eye:<p>&quot; Our email is completely secure. . . .&quot;<p>Why would Bill Gates say that? Surely he knew their e-mails were going plain text through a host of providers, network operators and mail relays, or weren&#x27;t they? Apparently PGP is from 1991, but they are using msmail (judging from the headers) so I don&#x27;t reckon they were using that.<p>The movie &quot;Hackers&quot; would come out about a year after that. The cyberpunk genre had been going on a full decade, did Bill really believe no one could read their e-mail? Of course Bill knew about security issues, but was it just not on his mind? Obviously it&#x27;s not very smart to talk about the sort of thing that is a fundamental threat to business of internet technology to a journalist, but to state outright that it was completely secure seems to be a be going a bit far.<p>I always wondered why it took so long for Microsoft to develop a proper security story, or even properly developing anything Internet related properly in that time. They could have been twice the company they are now if they took it as serious as this article makes it look Bill took it. Microsoft wasn&#x27;t anything on the Internet but the company who built your OS and let your mark up your documents for the next ten years after this article.

&quot;Around the same time, I read an essay in Wired magazine by Paul Saffo, who is a director of the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park, which argued that the information highway is going to cause a flowering of personal expression not seen in our society since the sixties, and that when this happens (maybe in five years) people whom we now think of as computer nerds will have the same hipness that in retrospect we now assign to beatniks.&quot;<p>Neat, he predicted the emergence of the hipster.

It&#x27;s amazing to get a 90s perspective on the &quot;information highway&quot;. Besides advanced home automation, self-driving cars wonder what types of immature technology we&#x27;re working on today will just be mainstream in the next 2 decades.

“I like Bill. Bill is a smart guy. But I think the problem is that Microsoft has caught the bunny. You know, when you go to the dog track they have that mechanical bunny that makes the dogs run? Well, sometimes a dog is so fast he catches the bunny and then the other dogs don’t run anymore. That’s the situation in the software business today: Bill has caught the bunny. I admire Bill for catching the bunny, but now we can’t have a race. He ought to be loosed from the bunny, to give the other dogs a chance.” Scott McNealy, the head of Sun Microsystems (Interesting analogy with zero sum game mindset...)

It made me smile that I was reading this in digital form on a computer that fits in my pocket and is always connected to the &quot;information highway&quot;.

&gt; &quot;The pioneers of personal computers including Jobs, Kapor, Lampson, Roberts, Kaye, are all great people but I don’t think any of us will merit an entry in a history book.&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t think that will prove true for Mr. Gates or Mr. Jobs.

Oh, boy, those compuserve numbers were annoying to exchange! I found them difficult to memorize and didn&#x27;t always have pen and paper around.

The amazing thing was that as late as 1994, Bill Gates had a public email address.

&gt; The information highway will be the opposite of this—more like the library of congress but with an easy way to find things.<p>I thought this line was interesting, seeing as this was before the advent of Google. Bill knew that there needed to be an easy way to find things. MSN search started around the same time as Google, but I believe they used Inktomi rather than develop their own crawler.

Reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg.

There are so many gems in this text :) For example:<p>&gt; Designing software—or “writing code,” as people in the trade say

&gt;In Japan, a comic book about the adventures of a boy modelled on Bill Gates is called &quot;Young Jump.&quot;<p>My curiosity has been piqued. Does anyone have a link?

When E-mail was written with a capital E - those were the days!

&gt; Sender: billg@microsoft.com<p>Now we know Bill Gates&#x27;s email address.