Video2001

Earthquake interrupts a Gates speech in Seattle

Footage of the magnitude-6.8 Nisqually earthquake striking during a Gates speech at a Microsoft event in Seattle on February 28, 2001; the audience flees as the chandeliers sway.

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Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 114 recordings of Bill Gates →

1998
United States v. Microsoft deposition
Roughly 20 hours of videotape of Gates being questioned by government lawyer David Boies in a Redmond conference room.
1998
Comdex Fall 1998 keynote (excerpts)
Excerpts of Gates’s Fall Comdex 1998 keynote, where he unveiled ClearType, survive in two Computer Chronicles episodes. The keynote came four weeks into the antitrust trial and days before the government played his deposition tapes in court.
1998
User-group presentation at Comdex (Office 2000 and more)
A 76-minute tape of Gates addressing an Association of PC User Groups audience at Comdex on November 15, 1998, demonstrating Office 2000 and other forthcoming products, with a montage of show-floor interviews appended.
1999
Comdex Fall 1999 keynote
Gates’s full Fall Comdex 1999 keynote, covering Windows 2000 Server clustering and remote management, Windows CE devices and Pocket PCs, and the new MSN start page.
2000
Xbox announced at the Game Developers Conference (report)
Gates’s GDC keynote in which he formally announced the Xbox, showing an early prototype and hardware demos; this is television coverage of the announcement rather than a complete keynote recording.
2001
Xbox unveiled at CES with The Rock
The moment Gates brought wrestler Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson on stage at his CES keynote to unveil the final Xbox design, ten months before the console’s launch.
2001
Earthquake interrupts a Gates speech in Seattle
Footage of the magnitude-6.8 Nisqually earthquake striking during a Gates speech at a Microsoft event in Seattle on February 28, 2001; the audience flees as the chandeliers sway.
2001
‘Playday’ internal comedy video
A leaked internal Microsoft video in which Gates and Ballmer parody ‘A Night at the Roxbury’, bobbing their heads to ‘What Is Love’ in a car and a nightclub; made for a company event and later widely circulated online.
2001
Charlie Rose
Gates talks to Charlie Rose about Windows XP, launched that day in New York, and the forthcoming Xbox.
2001
Antitrust settlement press conference (clips)
TechTV clips of the news conference at which Gates and Ballmer announced Microsoft’s proposed settlement with the Justice Department, with Gates saying the company would accept ‘new responsibilities’ and reporters asking how much more it would concede to the holdout states.
2002
Charlie Rose
Gates discusses the court’s approval of Microsoft’s antitrust settlement and demonstrates the new Tablet PC, launched that day.
2004
Charlie Rose
Gates on the need for computer science in higher education and the future of Microsoft, taped as he finished a five-campus tour (Illinois, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Harvard, Cornell) aimed at reviving student interest in computer science.
2005
Microsoft and academia: a dialogue with Maria Klawe
A 77-minute on-stage conversation between Gates and Princeton engineering dean Maria Klawe at the 2005 Faculty Summit about computer-science research, emerging technologies and the problems computing might help solve.