E-mail from Bill (1994)
newyorker.com
E-mail from Bill (1994)
1–10 of 72 posts
Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)
#2It's amazing to get a 90s perspective on the "information highway". Besides advanced home automation, self-driving cars wonder what types of immature technology we're working on today will just be mainstream in the next 2 decades.
Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)
#3Oh, boy, those compuserve numbers were annoying to exchange! I found them difficult to memorize and didn't always have pen and paper around.
Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)
#4It's amazing to get a 90s perspective on the "information highway". Besides advanced home automation, self-driving cars wonder what types of immature technology we're working on today will just be mainstream in the next 2 decades.
I was a kid in the 90's so I remember keenly the unmistakeable technological shift. People started saying "information highway" an awful lot. And I remember the first time me and my friend used dial up networking to play Doom 2, and I could see his character's movements on my screen in realtime, and I thought, "I am living in the future."
Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)
#5It's amazing to get a 90s perspective on the "information highway". Besides advanced home automation, self-driving cars wonder what types of immature technology we're working on today will just be mainstream in the next 2 decades.
I was a kid in the 90's so I remember keenly the unmistakeable technological shift. People started saying "information highway" an awful lot. And I remember the first time me and my friend used dial up networking to play Doom 2, and I could see his character's movements on my screen in realtime, and I thought, "I am living in the future."
wasn't it "information SUPER-highway"? :)
Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)
#6Reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg.
Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)
#7Reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg.
You're not the only one.
>Not long ago, Paul Saffo, of the Institute for the Future, said to me, “Bill Gates is an introvert. He is not the kind of person you want building the social network of the future.”
Looks like Saffo got his wish, Gates didn't build it.
Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)
#8"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."
Neat, he predicted the emergence of the hipster.
Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)
#9"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 r…
Did they? It seems like people are only interested in the surface of tech, the sexy acquisitions, the new Steve Jobs movie, the new iPhone. And then I try to bring up why password requirements are security theatre and people's eyes gloss over. I've taken to telling people my job description of "works at tech company" and leave it at that.
Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)
#10>"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. "
Very strange that only just 20-25 years ago, the richest people in the world were "only" worth <7,000,000,000