15 long time ago Bill Gates publish The Road Ahead , a book in which he laid out his visual modality for the hereafter of personal computing . The Atlantictook a flavor at his prediction and how they ’re holding up IN THE FUTURE .
Kinda well , it turns out . Gates seems to make out comfortably when he ’s verbalize about the future of computing twist themselves — he ’s on percentage point with his prevision that we ’d all be carrying billfold - sized PCs ( take : smart phones ) in our pocket and purses — but in terms of how we ’re using the engineering , he ’s no prophet . As The Atlantic ’s Tom McNichol explains , Gates ’s initial visual sensation of the cyberspace is fairly vague :
Prediction : Gates ’s 286 - Sir Frederick Handley Page book mentions the World wide-cut WWW on only four of its pages , and portrays the Internet as a subset of a much a larger “ Information Superhighway . ” The net , wrote Gates , is one of “ the crucial precursors of the information highway , ” along with PCs , CD - read-only storage , phone networks , and cable system , but “ none represents the factual selective information main road . … today ’s cyberspace is not the entropy main road I envisage , although you could think of it as the get-go of the main road . ”
Verdict : Miss. Gates ’s notion that the cyberspace would diddle a supporting role in the info main road of the future , rather than being the highway itself , was out - of - date the solar day The Road Ahead was published . Even Gates realized it . in brief before his book hit the stores , Gates reorganized Microsoft to focus more on the Internet , and he made major revise to a second edition of The Road Ahead , adding material that highlighted the significance of the Internet . In many way , Gates ’s cloudy quartz clod regarding the Internet amounted to aspirant thinking .
Still , in many manner this imaginativeness is correct — The Atlantic might be evaluating Gates a little too literally — and in any event it ’s incredibly fascinating to see one of the greatest idea in the industry seek to turn the clock forward and betoken what was on the horizon . you’re able to read the full analysis atThe Atlantic .
MicrosoftTechnology
Daily Newsletter
Get the best tech , science , and civilisation news in your inbox day by day .
News from the future , delivered to your present .
You May Also Like
