May 26th, 1995: Bill Gates sends a memo, entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” to all executive staff within Microsoft. In it, he makes clear his intention to focus the company’s efforts online with immediate effect and “assign the Internet the highest level of importance,” going on to call it, “the most important single development to […]
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Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics
(Not single page) For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous […]
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Microsoft’s Odd Couple
It’s 1975 and two college dropouts are racing to create software for a new line of “hobbyist” computers. The result? A company called “Micro-Soft”—now the fifth-most-valuable corporation on earth. In an adaptation from his memoir, Paul Allen tells the story of his partnership with high-school classmate Bill Gates, until its dramatic ending in 1983.
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USA Inc.: Red, White and Very Blue
What you’ll see on the following pages is hard to misinterpret: We have big issues, but the U.S. is in sounder shape than Apple was in 1997, when it lost a billion dollars. That’s the year Steve Jobs returned as CEO and took extreme measures, including agreeing to make Internet Explorer the Mac’s default browser. […]
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Inside The Deal That Made Bill Gates $350 Million (1986)
On the 25th anniversary of the company’s IPO, Fortune presents the inside story of Microsoft’s stock issue. For six months, writer Uttal followed around a young Bill Gates, whom he dubbed the “rabid rabbit” as he prepared himself and his company for the public markets.
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Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview (1994)
“Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus’ success in the spreadsheet—basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost. They were able to […]
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Mao, King Kong, and the Future of the Book
From Mao to Microsoft, a conversation on the unrecorded history of online publishing.
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Playboy Interview: Bill Gates (1994)
Playboy Interview: Bill Gates (1994) PLAYBOY: What else is Microsoft involved in? We’ve heard about software that can control washing machines, for instance. GATES: [Laughs] The washing machine example is extreme, but people do sometimes kid us that we see an opportunity to sell our software in broad areas. We are involved in a new […]
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Playboy Interview: Bill Gates (1994)
Playboy Interview: Bill Gates (1994) PLAYBOY: What else is Microsoft involved in? We’ve heard about software that can control washing machines, for instance. GATES: [Laughs] The washing machine example is extreme, but people do sometimes kid us that we see an opportunity to sell our software in broad areas. We are involved in a new […]
