Comdex Fall 1997 keynote (excerpts)

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 114 recordings of Bill Gates →

1. 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.

2. 1995

   Late Show with David Letterman

   Gates’s much-replayed sit-down with David Letterman: asked ‘what about this internet thing?’, he describes home pages and watching a baseball game online, to which Letterman replies ‘does radio ring a bell?’ and then ‘do tape recorders ring a bell?’.

3. 1995

   Fresh Air with Terry Gross

   A 22-minute NPR interview in which Gates discusses ‘The Road Ahead’ and how networked computing might change education, politics and business, framing the book as a prompt for discussion rather than a set of predictions.

4. 1996

   Professional Developers Conference demo clip (OnLive! Traveler)

   Footage of Gates’s PDC keynote demonstrating OnLive! Technologies’ 3D voice-chat world ‘Traveler’, preserved by virtual-worlds pioneer Bruce Damer.

5. 1996

   Charlie Rose

   A full-hour conversation in which Gates, then Microsoft’s CEO, discusses the future of the personal computer, the internet and interactivity, a year after the company’s internet pivot.

6. 1997

   Macworld Expo Boston keynote (satellite appearance)

   Steve Jobs’s first Macworld keynote after returning to Apple, at which he announced a $150 million Microsoft investment, five years of Office for Mac and Internet Explorer as the Mac’s default browser, and brought Gates onto a giant screen by satellite, to boos from the crowd.

7. 1997

   Comdex Fall 1997 keynote (excerpts)

   Highlights of Gates’s Fall Comdex 1997 keynote, preserved within the Computer Chronicles’ end-of-show roundup. The keynote came a month after the Justice Department asked a federal court to hold Microsoft in contempt over Internet Explorer bundling.

8. 1998

   Pie in the face in Brussels

   News footage of Gates being hit with a cream pie by Belgian prankster Noël Godin’s group as he arrived for a meeting with about 400 Belgian educators, business leaders and officials.

9. 1998

   Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on competition in the software industry

   Gates’s first and only congressional appearance of the antitrust era: a televised Senate Judiciary hearing chaired by Orrin Hatch in which he argued the software industry needed no new regulation while Netscape’s Jim Barksdale and Sun’s Scott McNealy accused Microsoft of abusing its Windows monopoly.

10. 1998

    Charlie Rose

    Gates discusses standards of fair competition in the technology marketplace, responding to the previous day’s Senate Judiciary hearing on the Microsoft antitrust fight.

11. 1998

    Windows 98 ‘blue screen’ demo at Comdex Spring

    The famous moment when a Windows 98 beta demonstration crashed to a Blue Screen of Death on stage as assistant Chris Capossela plugged in a scanner to show Plug and Play; Gates quipped, ‘That must be why we’re not shipping Windows 98 yet.’

12. 1998

    Buffett & Gates on success

    Gates and Warren Buffett field questions from University of Washington business students about success, luck, risk and their careers, in the session that became Fortune’s ‘The Bill & Warren Show’ and the PBS special ‘Buffett & Gates Go Back to School’.

13. 1998

    Microsoft eXtreme Spring 1998 (video welcome)

    A VHS of Microsoft’s ‘eXtreme’ consumer roadshow previewing Windows 98, Outlook 98 and other products; according to the archive description the show opens with a welcome from Gates.