‘Welcome to Microsoft’ new-employee orientation video

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 114 recordings of Bill Gates →

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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’.

8. 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.

9. 1995

   Triumph of the Nerds interview

   Gates is one of the on-camera interviewees in Cringely’s three-part history of the personal computer, discussing the Altair, IBM’s PC deal, the Macintosh and the rise of Windows. The programme was broadcast in 1996 but the interviews were filmed in 1995.

10. 1995

    MSN UK launch event

    A little-known three-hour recording of the Microsoft Network’s UK launch at ITV’s London Studios in late August 1995: Gates on a panel with British TV personalities (Angela Rippon, Jonathan Ross, Carol Vorderman and others), a press Q&A in which he is asked about Clifford Stoll’s ‘Silicon Snake Oil’, and a full presentation of MSN with UK content.

11. 1995

    Windows 95 launch

    The full August 24, 1995 launch show for Windows 95, emceed by Jay Leno, with Gates demonstrating the Start button, Office 95, Plug and Play, the Microsoft Network and Internet Explorer 1.0, and Brad Silverberg closing before the ‘Start Me Up’ commercial. The complete tape surfaced online only in April 2022.

12. 1995

    Gates inside Doom (Windows 95 games promo)

    A promotional video in which Gates, in a trench coat and carrying a shotgun, is composited into id Software’s Doom to pitch Windows 95 as a gaming platform. It was made for Microsoft’s Halloween 1995 ‘Judgment Day’ game-developer event promoting DirectX and the Windows 95 port of Doom.

13. 1995

    Comdex Fall 1995 keynote (excerpts)

    Excerpts of Gates’s Fall Comdex 1995 keynote survive inside the Computer Chronicles’ Comdex 1995 special, shot on location in Las Vegas three months after the Windows 95 launch.