For PC Magazine's charter issue in early 1982, the newly minted editor-in-chief and publisher David Bonnell flew to Seattle to interview a fresh-faced, 26-year-old Bill Gates, the president and co-founder of a little software company called Microsoft. Bonnell’s goal with this exclusive interview was to understand the part Microsoft and its software played in the development of the groundbreaking IBM PC that was born less than a year earlier. After all, that IBM PC was the namesake of Bonnell’s new publication.
In the interview, the two discuss how much fun it was for Bill and his team to contribute to the IBM project, how gratifying it was to have been part of it, and how the IBM and Microsoft products worked together to actually get it done. They even speak of shooting jokes back and forth via an early form of email used for communication between the two teams. Besides recalling many of the gritty details of how the software and hardware were developed together (it was a two-hour interview!), Gates speculates about the future of the PC and how it would eventually become ubiquitous and change the way people work.
More than four decades later, the concept of the personal computer has evolved so far beyond the 16-bit beige box that it’s barely recognizable.
He was right, of course. More than four decades later, the concept of the personal computer has evolved so far beyond the 16-bit beige box made primarily for hobbyists that it’s barely recognizable. The world around it has changed, too. PCs are just one tiny slice of the technology that has changed not only the way we work, but the way we exist. In 40 years here at PC Mag, we haven’t strayed far from our namesake (though with time, we did shorten the “magazine” part). But the world of what we cover has become much more vast. Phones, smartwatches, VR headsets, digital health and fitness gear, smart home devices, and electric cars, just to name a few categories, are now a large part of our reporting and reviews. (Still, we do test and rate more than 200 PCs each year to help you find the right one for your particular existence.)Four packed decades of technology evolution, 550+ magazine issues, more articles and reviews than you could ever count, and I'm the newly minted editor-in-chief of PC Mag, so I thought it would be fun to catch up with Bill Gates to get some fresh takes on where we’ve been, where we’re going, and what lies ahead. Here's what he had to say. More than four decades later, the concept of the personal computer has evolved so far beyond the 16-bit beige box that it’s barely recognizable. Bill Gates: The revolutionary concept of software as an amazing tool was the whole idea that Paul Allen and I built our company around. When Microsoft got started in 1975, our dream was a computer on every desk and in every home. We knew that the miracle advances in chips and the software that could be built because of those magic chips would make everyone want to use a computer. Later, we talked about information at your fingertips. Of course, it’s gone beyond that original dream with cell phones and sensors. But it still comes back to so much early important work driven by chips and great software.
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