Bill Gates in Byte Magazine: The Future of Software Design (1983)

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-08/1983_08_BYTE_08-08_The_C_Language#page/n399/mode/2up

by kick • 7 years ago

156 37 7 years ago

I love how the very next article is titled "The 8086 - An Architecture for the Future"

I love reading old computer magazines and the archive.org collection is amazing. One interesting thing about doing that is that it provides a first hand account of what a lot of the people that worked in the industry thought the future of computing would be like. It is fascinating to compare that view with how it turned out.

I wonder what people 30 years from now with think when they read HN archives?

sedatk• 7 years ago

Here is an issue of Computer Design magazine from 1983 which I scanned: https://archive.org/details/computer-design-magazine

It mentions:

- ArpaNet can be the future of commerce

- C is the key to portability

- Apple's Lisa introduces a revolutionary UI

Stratoscope2• 7 years ago

Thanks for scanning that! I used to read Computer Design back then, but I haven't seen one of the old issues in a while.

Coincidentally, the theme of this August 1983 BYTE is The C Language, with a dozen articles on C.

As always with these wonderful old BYTE magazines, at least skim through the whole thing. The cover art and the ads are a real treat. Hit the Home key and start from there!

mikorym2• 7 years ago

A few years ago I read a National Geographic article about "microchips" that was written in I think 1983.

It was probably one of the most useful articles on the topic that I've ever read. Unassuming, and full of direct explanations (and detail).

kick2• 7 years ago

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/the-chip/

This is what you were referring to, I'm guessing. 1982.

neovive• 7 years ago

I hope we can archive websites as well as magazines and newspapers. I feel that although so much more information is available now, large portions of it will be lost over time.

lonelappde2• 7 years ago

https://archive.org/

bakuninsbart• 7 years ago

Currently reading this book on programming language design: https://books.google.de/books/about/Principles_of_Programmin...

It didn't really make it into the top 100 of programming books of the 80s/90s, I found it in my grandparents attic. Still, it is a really fascinating read for a young person today. People back then obviously had very different expectations on the future of CS. Even more fascinating I think is the broadness of thinking that programmers were expected to have. The exercises at the end of chapters in this book go further than anything I did during my studies, and while certainly hard, they never feel unfair either.

cmrdporcupine• 7 years ago

I think I have the 1999 edition of that book. I don't really remember finding it dated. Maybe the earlier editions. I do remember it is an excellent book for learning PL fundamentals.

nv-vn• 7 years ago

Really forward-thinking stuff, but then again that's why Microsoft succeeded. It seems like all of Gates' predictions were spot-on in this article.

nabla93• 7 years ago

Everyone has blind spots.

Gates is famous for completely missing the success of the Internet. He thought that it had no consumer appeal and as a result MS was focused on Office and PC software when the dotcom boom started. His first version of "A Road Ahead" published in 1995 didn't have a chapter about Internet. It was added later.

To his credit he made complete 180 in his opinion in the same year and started to exploit MS monopoly power mercilessly to get ahead.

lonelappde2• 7 years ago

_The_ Road Ahead. Gates wasn't so modest.

Gates didn't miss the Internet. The first verst of the book said that the 1994 Internet was not the Internet of the future, and he was right about that. The Web got big in 1995 after Netscape Navigator came out (and Internet Explorer came shortly after). MS was anti web because the browser concept threatened the Windows monopoly as a computing platform. Gates/MS spent they next 5 years desperately trying to lock the Internet inside Windows, with ActiveX etc

jojo14• 7 years ago

"Really forward-thinking"? All of what Bill Gates "envisioned" in this 1983 article was already done or about to be done at that time. Gates is well known for being bad at prediction and for having no vision to imagine the future. It certainly is not the reason why Microsoft kind of "succeeded". No need to rewrite history.

petra• 7 years ago

> Gates is well known for being bad at prediction and for having no vision to imagine the future.

Interesting. Got any references for that ?

ncmncm• 7 years ago

Microsoft "succeeded" by cranking monopoly power absolutely as hard as it would go.

They haven't really changed, although they have learned to be less obvious about it.

They set the software world back by 20 years. Before Microsoft, nobody thought computers should just randomly fail all the time. They got people to think it was perfectly normal, and not a reason to send the damn thing back for a refund.

warpdrive• 7 years ago

He looks to be laying out his company roadmap in the open. Is this a good business strategy? Do you see similar articles from current founders?

jerf• 7 years ago

Roadmaps are a PR tool, and something you give to you customers to plan with, not something you keep secret. You can find all sorts of articles like this if you look in the right places.

Of course, they're also what you want your competitors to think you're doing, messages to Wall Street or investors, all the other usual things you'd expect from a PR vehicle.

nabla93• 7 years ago

The same edition has articles about coordinates systems in graphics and Gaus-Jordan elimination method. There are circuit diagrams and program listings. It was a real trade magazine.

Today that type of content is almost exclusively in in blogs.

Magazines write about stuff like "The Most Important Agile Trends to Follow in 2020". It's part marketing, influencing kind fluff where people write opinions about soft issues where you can't be clearly right or wrong.

giancarlostoro• 7 years ago

Magazines write about stuff like "The Most Important Agile Trends to Follow in 2020". It's part marketing, influencing kind fluff where people write opinions about soft issues where you can't be clearly right or wrong.

The mainstream ones sure, but there's others out there that don't. At least 2600 still the same.

kick2• 7 years ago

Related: 2600 recently started publishing DRM-free PDFs.

They're kind of floundering for funding, so if you like that sort of thing, you should probably grab a copy or subscription.

https://www.2600.com/content/message-our-readers

lovecg• 7 years ago

Also this was recently on HN and looks interesting: https://pagedout.institute

duxup• 7 years ago

I feel similarly about conferences sometimes.

Like there is a whole world of conferences about such things....but miles away from doing...

EddieCPU• 7 years ago

https://tech-insider.org/software/research/acrobat/8308.pdf

“The promise is that the existing machines could do the job much better-more easily, more efficiently - if software were better designed.”

'Vista 8'

peter303• 7 years ago

Andreason said this more succinctly in 'Software eats the world'.

dharmon• 7 years ago

Yeah, but that was 30 years later.

keithnz• 7 years ago

I love how that issue has all these other articles that have hidden gems of insight of things that, with the benefit of hindsight, would have been good to have taken note of. Including gems on Lisp, on the philosophy of designing software for unix and to make things small and testable as soon as possible. How things like structured programming had a lot of fluff talk around it that obscured the tiny gems of good ideas, that people got carried away with the "process".

Izmaki• 7 years ago

I love reading the advertisements for computer systems. 256K RAM for your business applications - can you imagine the potential?

rietta• 7 years ago

I downloaded the whole PDF and one thing I find mesmerizing is just how sophisticated the business graphs looked back then. It seems we're only starting to slowly catch up with these in many web apps again.

willis936• 7 years ago

The graph on page 350 is a good example. Gone is the golden age of data visualization.

herf• 7 years ago

Interesting how many of the integrations he talks about (OLE/DDE) are exactly the ones that mobile sandboxes make difficult to do these days.

Bill Gates in Byte Magazine: The Future of Software Design (1983)

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