Purplevision

Tonight on local TV I watched a lecture Bill Gates recently gave to students at the University of Washington. As I watched, I got to thinking about the well publicized assertion that Microsoft "missed" the Internet. Recently I also heard that it was Gates and Paul Allen, not as I thought Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who had the vision of a personal computer in every household.

These two ideas seem incongruous to me. What on Earth would people do with a computer in every household without the Internet?

Just this week I bought a headset microphone and started using Skype to talk with a friend in Portland while we play video games. I use email and instant messaging every single day and I am constantly looking up information on web pages.

Hindsight is easy but it just strikes me that the main use of a personal computer is communication. A personal computer IS the internet and visa versa. A personal computer in every household to run Visicalc or write your own compiler? I think not. Communication is a basic application and need that has value for everyone.

It is really quite amazing to think about how much the personal computer, the Internet and cell phones (a type of personal computer) have revolutionized human communication in the past 20 years. Fascinating stuff.