CATCHING UP WITH BILL GATES 40 YEARS LATER

In the first issue of PC Magazine, we interviewed 26-year-old Bill Gates about building the IBM PC. Four packed decades have passed, and he still has a lot to say about where we've been and where we're going.

- WENDY SHEEHAN DONNELL

For PC Magazine's charter issue in early 1982, the newly minted editor-in-chief and publisher David Bunnell flew to Seattle to interview a fresh-faced, 26-year-old Bill Gates, the president and co-founder of a little software company called Microsoft. Bunnell's goal with this exclusive interview was to understand the part Microsoft and its software played in the development of the groundbreaking IBM PC that was born less than a year earlier. After all, that IBM PC was the namesake of Bunnell's new publication.

In the interview, the two discuss how much fun it was for Bill and his team to contribute to the IBM project, how gratifying it was to have been part of it, and how the IBM and Microsoft teams worked together to actually get it done. They even speak of shooting jokes back and forth via an early form of email used for communication between the two teams. Besides recalling many of the gritty details of how the software and hardware were developed together (it was a two-hour interview!), Gates speculated about the future of the PC and how it would eventually become ubiquitous and change the way people work.

Of course, he was right. More than four decades later, the concept of the personal computer has evolved so far beyond the 16-bit beige box made primarily for hobbyists that it's barely recognizable. The world around it has changed, too. PCs are just one tiny slice of the technology that has changed not only the way we work, but the way we exist.