Computer Bowl II (West Coast contestant)

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 114 recordings of Bill Gates →

1. 1983

   Fall Comdex 1983 show-floor footage (cameo)

   VisiCalc co-creator Dan Bricklin and a colleague walked the floor of Fall Comdex 1983 with a video camera, capturing a long demonstration of the not-yet-shipped Microsoft Windows three weeks after its announcement and, elsewhere in the footage, a brief appearance by Gates.

2. 1984

   Macintosh introduction promotional film

   An Apple promotional film produced for the Macintosh rollout in which Bill Gates appears alongside Apple’s engineers, saying Microsoft had been working with Apple on the Mac for about two years, praising its graphics and speed and calling it ‘a great machine’ many people would be able to afford.

3. 1985

   Windows 1.0 introduction and demo

   Period footage of a 30-year-old Gates presenting Windows 1.0, walking through its tiled windows and switching between applications. It is one of the few surviving on-camera records of Microsoft’s first graphical product at the time of its November 1985 release.

4. 1987

   Twenty-minute interview (1987)

   A twenty-minute interview with the 31-year-old Gates from 1987, the year he became the youngest billionaire and Microsoft announced OS/2 with IBM, Windows 2.0 and Excel for Windows. The program and interviewer are not identified in the archived copy.

5. 1987

   Microsoft Excel press questions

   A short news clip of Gates, glasses slipping down his nose, answering press questions at the unveiling of Excel for Windows, telling reporters it ‘really improves the quality of your output’.

6. 1989

   Talk on Microsoft and the software industry

   A roughly 90-minute talk to Waterloo students, rediscovered and digitised by the university’s Computer Science Club in 2007, in which the 33-year-old Gates recounts the microcomputer industry from the Altair onward, explains the 640K memory barrier and the 8-bit to 16-bit transition, defends Microsoft’s OS/2 strategy, discusses the Apple v.

7. 1990

   Computer Bowl II (West Coast contestant)

   Gates competes on the West Coast team (with John Doerr, Stewart Alsop, Charles House and Larry Tesler) against an East Coast team including Pat McGovern and Bob Frankston in the second annual Computer Bowl, a Computer Museum fundraiser hosted by Stewart Cheifet with Mitch Kapor as questioner.

8. 1990

   The Global Software Market (Computer Chronicles)

   A Computer Chronicles report on American dominance of the world software market at the start of the 1990s, shot at the SPA’s international conference in Cannes, with Gates among the listed guests and narration on Microsoft’s international strategy and Windows 3.0.

9. 1990

   ‘Information at Your Fingertips’ Comdex keynote

   Gates’s first great Comdex keynote, six months after Windows 3.0, lays out the ‘Information at Your Fingertips’ vision: a scripted demo of an easy, sound-enabled interface, home catalogs, a full electronic encyclopedia and pen computing, with Gates acting out conversations with harried professionals who wish for better tools.

10. 1991

    Swiss TV interview on Windows 3.0

    During a European trip, Gates explains to Swiss television what Windows 3.0 can do, ‘provided you have 3 MB of memory’, a short item from the Swiss public broadcaster’s archive that Microsoft Germany later used in its own Windows 3.0 retrospective.

11. 1991

    Computer Bowl III (official examiner)

    A year after competing, Gates returns as the ‘official examiner’ who reads the trivia questions, co-hosting with Stewart Cheifet as West Coast (Philippe Kahn, Heidi Roizen, Ed Juge, Dave House, David Liddle) meets East Coast (John Markoff, Pamela McCorduck, John Armstrong, James Clark, Samuel Fuller) at the San Jose Convention Center.

12. 1991

    ‘Windows at Work’ keynote, first Windows World

    Gates’s keynote at the first Windows World, the Windows-focused show co-located with Spring Comdex, pitching Windows 3.0 as a corporate platform (‘Windows at Work’) a year after its launch. The Computer History Museum holds a Microsoft-published VHS of the keynote in the James N. Porter papers; no online copy is known.

13. 1992

    Computer Bowl IV (official examiner)

    The fourth Computer Bowl, held in Boston, with Gates again reading the questions as official examiner; players include John Warnock, John Shoch, Heidi Roizen, Pamela McCorduck, Andy Rappaport and Bill Machrone.