Andrew Grumet’s thoughts on Tablet PCs mentioned in the previous post were spawned by an audio recording of Bill Gate’s keynote at ADAPSO in 1991 that Dave Winer posted. In the keynote, Bill Gates talks about the current state of pen computing and its future.
It’s worth listening to the whole recording–simply from a historical perspective. It shows how far we’ve come and how far we haven’t.
I thought the pen computing segment was so interesting that I transcribed it.
Before I get to the transcript, let me set some context using some info pulled from the recording…
Most people are running DOS on a 386 machine. In the year 1991 20 million DOS/Windows systems were sold, 2 million Apple systems, and 250,000 Sun computers. The 486 was still a high-end system and as Gates mentions in his keynote, “1-Gb logical address space should prove adequate for personal computer applications for the rest of the decade.”
If you got a chuckle out of this, you’ll probably enjoy Gates comments on pen computing (It starts just before the 22 minute mark in the recording):
…I have a slide here, specifically talking about the move towards the pen as an input device because I think it is a great illustration of how things are changing. The pen promises to bring personal computing to areas that it
1-gb of logical address space was pretty much valid for the rest of the 90s wasn’t it or at least 4gb, the limit of 32bit? I mean, just now in 2004 are we starting to see consumer 64bit stuff…Or am I missing something?