Smithsonian video history interview

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 114 recordings of Bill Gates →

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 1992

   Spring Comdex 1992 (Computer Chronicles special)

   Highlights of Spring Comdex 1992 in Chicago, the show at which Windows 3.1 (released April 6) was the main story; the episode description lists Gates and Stewart Alsop as featured guests.

4. 1992

   Fall Comdex 1992 (Computer Chronicles special)

   Computer Chronicles’ Fall Comdex 1992 report, in which Gates says Microsoft ‘hopes to cover all the bases’ and describes software as an ideal start-up industry for a small country, amid the year’s multimedia hype.

5. 1993

   ETRE Barcelona 1993 (Computer Chronicles)

   Computer Chronicles covers the ETRE conference in Barcelona, with Gates visiting a groupware demonstration and discussing Windows NT and the growing size of the Windows code base alongside Esther Dyson, Philippe Kahn, Masayoshi Son and others.

6. 1993

   Computer Bowl V (official examiner)

   Gates’s third consecutive year as official examiner, introduced as chairman of the board of Microsoft, questioning players including Patricia Seybold, Mitchell Kertzman, Jean-Louis Gassée and Jerry Kaplan.

7. 1993

   Smithsonian video history interview

   A long, multi-session videotaped oral history conducted at Microsoft by David Allison of the Smithsonian’s Division of Computers, Information and Society, in connection with Gates’s 1993 Computerworld Smithsonian Price Waterhouse Leadership Award for Lifetime Achievement.

8. 1994

   Computer Bowl VI, All-Star edition (West Coast contestant)

   Gates returns as a player for the all-star sixth Computer Bowl, on a West Coast team with Bill Joy and David Liddle against Mitch Kapor’s East Coast team, with Intel’s Andy Grove asking the questions and some participants joining by satellite from Redmond and Boston.

9. 1994

   NASDAQ and Microsoft television promos featuring Gates

   Short 1994 television spots in NASDAQ’s ‘stock market for the next hundred years’ campaign that feature Gates and Microsoft’s rise, comparing the company’s size to Xerox, Kodak and McDonald’s; off-air recordings from Cleveland cable.

10. 1994

    CBS ‘Eye to Eye with Connie Chung’ profile (the chair jump)

    In a 1994 CBS ‘Eye to Eye’ segment, Connie Chung’s profile of the 38-year-old Gates includes the much-replayed moment in which he jumps over an office chair from a standing start, a party trick that became shorthand for his restless physical energy.

11. 1994

    ‘Future Vision’: Microsoft Plus partner program video

    A roughly twenty-minute 1994 Microsoft partner-program tape presenting Gates’s ‘future vision’ for the company and its platforms, digitised from an out-of-print VHS for the Internet Archive’s VHS Vault.

12. 1994

    ‘Welcome to Microsoft’ new-employee orientation video

    A 1994 Microsoft orientation film in which the 39-year-old Gates tells new hires the company story: how he and Paul Allen bet on the microprocessor, why Microsoft focused on Intel’s 16-bit chip, how the mouse at first looked like ‘maybe we had made a mistake’ before selling hundreds of thousands a month, how Apple ‘bet their company’ on graphical interfaces and Microsoft bet alongside it by writing Mac applications, and why Windows 3.0 was ‘a major milestone in the history of the PC industry’.

13. 1994

    Fall Comdex 1994 keynote highlights (Computer Chronicles)

    Computer Chronicles’ Comdex special carries highlights of Gates’s opening keynote, in which he told the industry ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’, used the stage to promote the forthcoming Microsoft Network online service, and screened the ‘Information at Your Fingertips 2005’ vision film, with Windows 95 due ‘next year’ and OS/2 Warp, Pentium and PowerPC machines on the show floor.