The Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year 2021’, Elon Musk shared a throwback video featuring Bill Gate's appearance on David Letterman’s show back in 1995. The TV host mocks the business magnate for backing the internet in the interview.
The Tesla CEO shared the TikTok video on Twitter on December 20. The clip was earlier shared on This Week In Startups TikTok account. American internet entrepreneur Jason Calamaris can be seen watching the old clip from The David Letterman Show.
In the video, Calamaris gave a brief introduction to the television show initially. His instant responses to the interview are visible through split screen. Letterman can be heard asking Bill Gates,”…what about this internet thing, do you know anything about that?” The 1990s audience laughs out loud as Bill Gates says, “Sure.” “What the hell is that, exactly,” asks Letterman. Bill Gates explains,” Well, it has become a place where people are publishing information ''so'' everybody can have their own homepage. Companies are there… it's wild what’s going on. You can send electronic mail to people. It's the big new thing.” Letterman could not believe that a baseball game could be heard or watched on a computer. He also agrees that he is criticizing something he does not fully understand.
“But you know, ''it's'' easy to criticize something you don’t fully understand, which is my position here. But I can remember, a couple of months ago there was like a big breakthrough announcement that on the internet or on some computer deal they were going to broadcast a baseball game… you could listen to a baseball game on your computer and I just thought to myself does radio ring a bell?”
The audience laughs out loud while Bill Gates point out the nuances of internet. “There is a difference. It’s not a huge difference, you can listen to the baseball game whenever you want,” says Bill Gates.
“So it's stored in one of your memory deals ''and'' you can access it one year later,” Letterman replies. Again, Letterman mocks, “Do tape recorders ring a bell?”
Calamaris come up, defending internet, towards the end of the video. “It's so easy now to look back on that and say well it’s global, it’s free 'and' it’s accessible 24 hours a day for free and anybody can publish to it whereas only ''a few'' number of people can publish to the radio, right?
“There is a gatekeeper ''so'' we never even got to the gatekeeper part of this and those would be the other reasons that this is incredible. This is triggering all these discussions, I used to have where I tried to explain the internet to people when I was 23, 24. And that’s I think what’s happening now with web3,” he says in the video. The video has garnered over 4 million views. Netizens shared their enthusiasm towards technological development in the comments section. The SpaceX CEO, Musk replied to his tweet, “I’m not suggesting web3 is real – seems more marketing buzzword than reality right now – just wondering what the future will be like in 10, 20 or 30 years. 2051 sounds crazy futuristic!”
‘Web3’ refers to Web 3.0, which could be the upgraded version of the World Wide Web. The function of Web3 would be to decentralize the internet fully, dampening the monopoly of big tech giants, as per Yahoo News.
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