Letterman
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2022–2023
0:59 · 239K views · Jun 27, 2022
A clip from a 1995 Late Show with David Letterman in which Bill Gates discusses Microsoft's origins and the internet while Dave is skeptical of computers.
HN cites it as a classic example of public skepticism toward a new technology that later proved transformative.
4 comments from Hacker News
Well, that sounds exactly like what people said about all the other technologies that were "on a computer". Watch this exchange, for instance, between Bill Gates and David Letterman... about "this internet thing" this video Or the Today show wondering what the point is: [LINK] Technology empowers individuals and smaller communities. That's what it does throughout history. Personal computers. Personal printers. Now you can send email instead of relying on a centralized post office. VOIP disrupted Ma Bell monopolies in our lifetimes, instead of $3 a minute phone calls you can now do full videoonferencing for free. The Web instead of gatekeepers at radio, TV, magazines, newspapers, etc. In all of those cases, you could question why "on a computer" matters. Who needs email when there are phonecalls? Who needs the Web anyway when there is email? Who needs online dating sites when there are matchmakers? Nathan Myrhvold at Microsoft told people at Excite that "search is not a business". Economist Paul Krugman wrote that by 2005, it would become clear that the Internet's effect on the economy is no greater than the fax machine's. Well, these smart contracts are programmable, and you program against one widespread platform, like JVM or in this case EVM. That's a huge benefit. You can have programmable money, programmable elections, without having to deal with thousands of APIs, or as you are saying "normal" physical currency. Governments in fact also want to phase out cash, and even bank
If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public. The general public didn't really start to adopt personal computers en masse until the 90s. And if you look at, for example, conversations between David Letterman and Bill Gates regarding the internet in the 1995 ( this video ), and Gates tries to explain to him the advantage of it and David pans that he doesn't get it, with the audience laughing along to dismissive jokes about it being unnecessary complexity versus radio and cassette tapes. That was the prevailing attitude regarding computers even well into the 90s (now, they're pervasive).
The infamous Bill Gates and David Letterman interview was in 1995: this video Lots of people definitely didn't understand what a big deal it was going to be then. In October 1994 a Wired journalist registered mcdonalds.com and then tried to give it to Mcdonalds, but couldn't reach anyone who understood the importance of domain name registration: [LINK] In my recollection it really wasn't til 1998-2001 or so that people (where I lived in the southern U.S. anyway) really started to take notice.
Why can’t this argument be used against any new technology? They said exactly this about the Internet… why do you need it? See all the well established solutions at the time: this video