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In his 1995 book The Road Ahead, Bill Gates discussed his early experiences in computers in the late 1960s. In particular, he described the expense of renting time on computers:
The mainframe we played tic-tac-toe on in 1968, like most computers of that time, was a tempermental monster that lived in a climate-controlled cocoon. After we had used up the Mother's club grant, Paul Allen and I spent a lot of time trying to get access to computers. The computers performed modestly by today's standards, but they seemed awesome to us because they were big and complicated and cost as much as millions of dollars each. They were connected by phone lines to clackety Teletype terminals so that they could be shared by people at different locations. We rarely got close to the mainframes themselves. Computer time was very expensive. When I was in high school, it cost about $40 an hour to access a time-shared computer using a Teletype--for that $40 an hour you got a slice of the computer's precious attention. ... Actually, it was possible even then to own your own computer. If you cold afford $18,000, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) would sell you a PDP-8.
In stark contrast to his youth, Bill Gates now believes that computer power will be almost free within a decade. At the Gartner Symposium ITxpo Gates claimed that:
Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free--I'm not saying it will be absolutely free--but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the network will not be a limiting factor.
Gates argued that applications such as speech-recognition and handwriting recognition will become omnipresent, and will be built into desktops, laptops, and PDAs. Microsoft's annual R&D expenditures, currently at US$6.8 billion, surpass even Intel's R&D spending, and Microsoft is investing heavily in new software technologies. Bill Gates is not the first to predict that the cost of computer hardware will soon become almost negligible; Michio Kaku has also made similar predictions. If Mr. Gates and Mr. Kaku are correct, the costs for computing in a decade or so will almost entirely hinge upon software, energy, and service costs
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Posted: 2004-03-31 02:17:58
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intrestin thry, but cant hapn. nu software req mor tech & for tech to inc, u need ppl & ppl need $. so cant hapn until... This message was posted from a WAP device
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Posted: 2004-03-31 04:08:01
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eh? could you translate that last post in english?
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Posted: 2004-03-31 09:12:33
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Cool! In ten years well be getting free pcs! This message was posted from a T65
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Posted: 2004-03-31 11:04:23
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....with expensive softwares and services.
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Posted: 2004-03-31 11:14:42
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Complete rubbish, can you imagine the min specs for windoze 2014?!

512 gig of ram,
multiple optical based processors, or wat ever,
2 terabytes of disc space...

AII for just $1999

As fast as computers get, bill gates just keeps slowin em down with crappy software.
And we will still just put up with it.
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Posted: 2004-03-31 11:20:00
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Billy has never been very good with his predictions. In 1983, he predicted that 256k of RAM and an 8Mhz processor would be enough to run absolutely any application whatsoever, and that computers would never have to become more powerful than this.

Funny how Windows XP can cause even a 3Ghz machine to grind to a halt then, isn't it?
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Posted: 2004-03-31 14:54:21
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Windows 2014?

Mark my words, wait until 2010 and you shall see if Windows still exist.
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Posted: 2004-03-31 15:12:42
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Windows (windoze, winslows) will always be around as ppl get it as standard with most computers. Linux is too complicated and macos is too specialised for the average shmuck, and the other operating systems are too small to challenge microsloth. As long as that remains the case them bill gates will control the price of software and hardware This message was posted from a T610
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Posted: 2004-03-31 17:20:23
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I think Linux might become more popular in the future, although I agree that it'll probably never overtake windows simply because windows already has such a huge lead.

The problem with linux is not so much it's complexity, you can already get Linux with a graphical front-end that is very similar to windows. The problem is lack of support. Until printers, scanners, cameras and other peripherals come with linux drivers on the installation disk, and software producers start making mainstream apps and games for linux, manufacturers will not consider producing off-the-shelf linux PC systems. Trouble is, software and hardware producers will not consider supporting linux until more people are using it.

It's a vicous circle
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Posted: 2004-03-31 17:35:48
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