Name: Bill Gates' 1993 prediction for the future of computers | BBC Global
Uploaded: 2025-04-20T21:01:10.000Z
Duration: 5 min 10 s
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The superlative

Microsoft is the world's largest software company.

Microsoft is 10,000 people in one location up near Seattle, playing Nerf football at 2 o'clock in the morning.

Some time ago we only had hundreds of employees, and now we have thousands.

We're adding 50, 100 employees a week sometimes, and we stick them all in offices like these for privacy, but how do we get them to talk to each other?

Well, the glue that we use is called e-mail.

Everyone in the entire company worldwide is connected using electronic mail, which creates an electronic village.

It also allows us to transcend the borders of time or geographic barriers in that I can be sending a message today to Bill, and he may read it in his office, or he may read it in a hotel room in Paris.

Today, things are so inefficient. All this paper that you dig through, all these computer-printed reports, all these meetings.

So just in a pure business side, information can be wonderful.

So I think information is very fundamental.

The physical meeting in many cases has been replaced by reading and hearing how people would say things.

So e-mail ends up being a carrier of the culture.

When you're pushing pixels around on the screen and you get absorbed, you slowly go into the screen and you get this strain in your neck, and you're just shoving pixels around.

So when you see someone leaning almost nose to the screen, you call them a PixelNetGeek.

Bandwidth is, in a computer, it's the amount of data you can transfer from one part to another.

But at Microsoft, people talk about it in relation to the amount of input that a particular person can process.

Bill Gates has the biggest bandwidth of anybody I've ever met.

Certainly computers will be, in any meaningful sense, as smart as people at some point.

It's turned out to be a very hard problem, and it'll still take some time, but we will get there.

There's no secret sauce that the old chips won't be able to deal with.

A few things that happen when you take information into the digital realm, not very many people are thinking about it because so many companies now are so excited about how much money they can make on an information society.

You know, a CD-ROM holds 600 megabytes of data.

That's so much you can't even imagine how much data that is.

So if you can sell a CD-ROM for 50, 60, 100 dollars, I mean, that's an enormous amount of profit.

So the home will be a tougher frontier to conquer, but if you take a time frame like 15 years or certainly 20 years,

I have no doubt that that vision of a computer in every home, although it won't look like today's computer, that'll absolutely be achieved.

Here in the U.S., we have quite a few TV channels.

This listing here has got over 25 of them.

But cable technology and digital compression is going to expand that number enormously.

Recent announcements have suggested there'll be 500 or 1,000 TV channels.

Imagine what your favorite bookstore would be like if there were only 5 books.

Now, there is one problem with having 500 or 1,000 channels, which is how you find what's going on.

By the time that you'd flip through 500 channels, it'd be time to go to sleep.

The solution is to have an online interactive guide that uses computer technology to organize the channels, show them to you by topic, even learn the material that you like to watch, and then present it to you in an online fashion right on the television.

The machine can learn what you like to watch because it can record those shows or record the salient details of those shows that you do watch.

It can then prompt you and say, "Did you realize this was coming up next week?"

Or, "I know you'll be out then, why don't I keep it for you, so you can watch it on your return."

I think it's just really important that people understand that there's two sides to every story, that when the ease of sitting in front of your interactive TV, five years hence,

and being able to order something by pushing your remote control, that means that information about you is going through a network.

That means that whoever is on the other end of that network knows what you're watching on television, can get your credit card number, and know lots of things about you that maybe you don't want them to know.