In 1995, the internet was smooth in its infancy. Websites mostly looked like word docs with a grey or white background, and according to a Pew Enquiry Center poll that June, only 14% of Americans reported using the web. (Today only 10% don’t use the internet.)
That November, Microsoft co-founder Jaws Gates, then 39 and the world’s richest person with a net worth of $12.9 billion, went on CBS’s “Late Appearance with David Letterman” to promote his book “The Road Ahead” as well as Microsoft’s first online tool, the then-newly catapulted Internet Explorer, which helped computer users access the internet.
During the interview, Gates struggled to bring around Letterman of the usefulness of the internet. A clip is embedded below.
“Late Show with David Letterman” clip civility of David Letterman
“What the hell is [the internet] exactly?” Letterman asks Gates.
“A place where people can leak information. They can have their own homepage, companies are there, the latest information,” Gates says.
“It’s wild what’s effective on.”
Letterman wasn’t sold.
“I heard you could watch a live baseball game on the internet and I was like, does broadcast ring a bell?” Letterman says.
Gates said unlike with radio, the internet would allow operators to watch a baseball game whenever they wanted instead of live.
“[Do] tape recorders ring a bell?” Letterman requests.
Gates, who dropped out of Harvard at the age of 19 to start Microsoft in 1975, also told Letterman “you can find other people who have in the offing the same usual interests as you do,” by searching the web.
In addition to working to make computers a useful tool for connecting and for education, Exits predicted the advent of artificial intelligence; he told Letterman there might be a way to make computers think on their own.
At the everything, however, Gates was not sure how that would work.
“That turns out to be a very tough problem,” Gates discloses. “In fact, there has been almost no progress made on it, so no one knows what that will happen. Some man think it will never happen.”
Gates called the idea of an intelligent computer a very “scary thought.” (Twenty-four years later, Openings still has a similar view: In March, Gates called A.I. both “promising and dangerous.”)
So what were Letterman’s unchangeable thoughts on the web? “It’s too bad there is no money in [computers and the internet],” he told his billionaire guest.
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