Bill Gates: The Road Ahead

I made a video to present this multimedia CD. It’s a strangely prescient view of the future by a younger Bill Gates.

Back in 1995, Bill Gates wrote a book about the future of computing. Included with the book is an interactive CD with “multimedia” sections. So as you read the book there are hyperlinks with videos, audio and pictures. Also included is an interview with Bill Gates.

I got my hands on a copy of the CD, ran Windows 3.1 in DosBox and made this video of what I found. The only thing I forgot to show was the “house of the future” section.

He predicted lots of stuff about the “information superhighway” – for example, he thought that video-on-demand would be huge. I wonder if he ever guessed that his predictions, as well as the rest of the multimedia CD, would all end up in a YouTube video 19 years later?