Bill Gates explains this “internet” thing #letterman

What people said

pcthrowaway · 2023-05 · Reference

The infamous Bill Gates and David Letterman interview was in 1995: [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.

Read the original HN comment ↗

EGreg · 2022-12 · Reference

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: [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

chrisco255 · 2022-12 · Reference

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 ( [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).

Read the original HN comment ↗