(Bonus) The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates? (Pt. 1)
Tech Brew Ride Home
Amalgamated Internets, LLC
4.7 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2019
⏱️ 45 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to a special July 4th weekend bonus episode of the Tech Beam |
| 0:08.8 | Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough. Some of you may know my hobby |
| 0:12.4 | podcast, the Internet History Podcast. It's mostly |
| 0:15.6 | interviews with tech folk, sort of oral histories of their careers or major |
| 0:20.4 | tech events. |
| 0:22.6 | You can also hear me read early drafts of chapters of my book on there, but now and then |
| 0:28.1 | I've done these special episodes around unique moments in tech history that didn't make the book but are fascinating Silicon Valley |
| 0:35.2 | lore that I figure is worth preserving nonetheless. So this weekend I thought I'd give you one of those. |
| 0:42.3 | A real sit back and listen to this story. If you've |
| 0:46.1 | never heard it before, a sort of long read, except written by me. This is actually the most fully produced episode of any |
| 0:54.8 | podcast I've ever done. This is a story that was already legend when I got into |
| 1:00.0 | tech in the late 90s but was probably way more well known in the 1980s. |
| 1:06.0 | If you know your tech history, then you know that Bill Gates and Microsoft made their fortune |
| 1:10.8 | by creating the once impeachable software platform of DOS first and then Windows. |
| 1:18.0 | When the PC era dawned, IBM needed an operating system and Bill Gates and Microsoft gave them one. But funny story, when IBM first came calling, |
| 1:28.0 | Microsoft wasn't actually in the operating system business. Bill Gates and company did languages. They didn't do |
| 1:35.3 | OS's. The man who did have an OS was Gary Kildall. But Microsoft ended up |
| 1:42.4 | delivering the operating system for the first IBM PC. Bill Gates became |
| 1:46.6 | Bill Gates and the rest is history. So what happened there? It's been debated for years. Why was Microsoft able to seize on one of the |
| 1:56.1 | greatest business opportunities of all time? Possibly one that they shouldn't have been able to |
| 2:01.9 | seize on. |
| 2:03.7 | This is the story of the man who could have been Bill Gates, question mark. |
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