The Road Ahead
Bill Gates' 1995 analysis of the impact of information and computer technology on society and predictions about the future. Includes a great overview of ancient counting machines to mainframe big-iron to the dramatic changes of personal computing. Talks about the early years of Microsoft, Apple and Steve Jobs, DEC and Compaq, IBM and IBM compatibles. In addition, the importance of software and its complexity, power, and cost of production.
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What Hacker News says
- The Road Ahead by Bill Gates (1995)
It made me realize it's not companies I would like to be working at but people I would like to be working with.
- You should read Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead"[1] from 1995 before dismissing things so readily out of hand. It's been a few years since I read it but he describes the setup in detail. It was incredibly complex even by today's standards - and this was 30 years ago!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Bill_Gates_b...
- Anyone who finds this interesting should track down a copy of The Road Ahead (http://www.amazon.com/Road-Ahead-Bill-Gates/dp/9573231670/), the book Gates published at around the same time as this appeared. It's an interesting look at his thinking just when he was beginning to realize (very nearly too late!) that the Internet was going to be a Very Big Deal.
- Read this:
* Bill Gates's memoir/vision book, The Road Ahead (1995)
* Paul Allen's memoir book, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft (2011)
Watch this:
* Pirates of Silicon Valley TV movie (funny but accurate, based on Triumph of the Nerds interviews)
* Triumph of the Nerds (TV docu, 1996, by R. Cringely)
* Nerds 2.0.1 (TV docu, 1998, by R. Cringely)
- Like others, I wish I had read "The C Programming Language" earlier than when I did (probably did not get to it until my mid-20's or so). However, I am really glad I read "The Road Ahead" by Bill Gates while still in high school. That gave me a "vision for the future". So in terms of "what influenced me the most" starting out, it was definitely that.
- I feel that if Microsoft had taken Bill Gates' book "The Road Ahead" and implemented a lot of the ideas in the book they could have preempted Apple and Google by several years! What's amazing to me is that the book is over 15 years old and just now a lot of what he mentioned in there with respect to the cloud is being implemented. Not by his company but Apple.
