6 ms·

Email from Bill (1993)

56 points by pr337h4m 4y ago

cat_plus_plus 4y ago
"Email is not a good way to get mad at someone since you can’t interact. You can send friendly messages very easily since those are harder to misinterpret." LOL
Shared404 4y ago
> Our email is completely secure. . . . It's very interesting looking back at historical software/communication, and realizing how wrong we have been about so many things, and realizing how wrong we likely are about many others.
- adtac 4y ago
  Security only makes sense in the context of the technology available to an attacker _at that time_, so I don't think he was wrong. The same way I'm not wrong to say X25519 ECDH is secure even though it's very unlikely we'd still be using it in the year 2100.
  - Shared404 4y ago
    True, but wasn't email transmitted unencrypted over the wire back then? That seems like a pretty big leap to call secure even when adjusting for the technology available to attackers at that time.
    - fipar 4y ago
      It was transmitted unencrypted, along with traffic for many other protocols. I have not read the article, but the 1993 note implies this was a time when rsh, telnet, and ftp were still in common use. I don't disagree with you that it's a big leap to call it secure, but my point is I reckon he was not alone making that leap back then.
      - doctor_eval 4y ago
        No, nobody thought email was secure at the time, that statement stood out to me as well. It’s just an example of marketing bullshit, as is the whole article.
    - kragen 4y ago
      yes, and the sender was entirely unauthenticated, bgp was and is entirely unauthenticated, and dns was entirely unauthenticated
dhruvmittal 4y ago
I'm too young to have imagined thinking about Bill Gates the way we think about Zuckerberg today but reading this, it occurs to me that people must have.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Shared404 4y ago
  We're probably about the same age, but that is definitely the case! If anything, Gates was likely seen as somewhat worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
  - kalu 4y ago
    Hi Mark
    - Shared404 4y ago
      Hah, no, don't get me wrong - Facebook sucks, the Zuck sucks. Full stop. As much as I dislike what Microsoft has done, Facebook is far worse. But I've seen less art of Zuckerberg drawn as a demon coming for your software - though that may just be a difference between the internet now and what I've seen of the internet in the past.
      - hulitu 4y ago
        Microsoft hasn't finished.
  - adventured 4y ago
    Gates was widely revered by the public as primarily a positive wunderkind business genius until the later half of the 1990s, when he became particularly richer than everyone else, Microsoft became increasingly powerful, and the robber baron image took over. In the early days he didn't have to survive an era of everything-public as Zuckerberg did (there are no leaked chat logs from when Gates was 19 et al). At 30, most people in the US still didn't know who Gates was (maybe they had heard his name once), much less know anything of consequence about him. Today, if Zuckerberg does or says anything embarrassing, tomorrow hundreds of millions of people will see the headlines and read about it on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. Gates and Microsoft got to ride rather quietly to the top of the tech universe until the mid 1990s. Tech just wasn't nearly so important circa 1980-1990 (vs comparing Microsoft or Apple to GM or McDonalds or Coca Cola today).
RyanShook 4y ago
It’s surprising to me how many tech companies wanted to dominate the TV set top box in the 90s.
- 10241024 4y ago
  Bill Gates was prescient about many things we are living with right now - video-on-demand, online shopping, "wallet PCs" (smartphones), voice recognition, "social interfaces" (Siri, Alexa). I recommend his book The Road Ahead (1995).
- msla 4y ago
  Java was derived from a language called Oak, which was intended to run on set-top boxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(programming_language) The 1990s had two big things: The Web and cable TV. The smart money was on convergence, which meant that the Web would merge with cable TV and create something entirely new. This happened, kinda, but not in the way people back then imagined; as it turns out, "Cable TV" + "The Internet" = "The Internet" so "Convergence" is just doing everything over an Internet connection.
- uni_rule 4y ago
  It really is wild to me (with the unquestioned gift of hindsight) that all of these companies saw these massive developments in CPUs, fiber optics, etc. and their immediate reaction was solely a lust for the future in the form of video on demand specifically. Kinda like an inverted form of that alleged Henry Ford quote, if you asked a corporation what they thought the future was then they would say a better TV.
mproud 4y ago
I love the journalist’s email, with uppercase letters and all: 73124.1524@CompuServe.COM I also love how they spell it “E-mail” with a capital E no matter where it is in the sentence.
- function_seven 4y ago
  Reminds me of when Wired Magazine decided to include the hyphen in their house style [0]. Prior to that they were hip and cool and spelled it as “email”. (I refuse to believe I read that 22 years ago!) [0] https://www.wired.com/2000/10/readers-on-wired-news-style/ https://www.wired.com/2000/10/readers-on-wired-news-style/
discretion22 4y ago
One of the carefully orchestrated PR articles at the height of the investigations into Microsoft. Even in the early '90s, Microsoft were operating at genius level for their control of public discussion about the company. One of my all-time favorite bullshit claims is the "Gates always flies coach when he is traveling on business." and the hilariously ridiculous "Experienced fliers into and out of Seattle know to scan the cabin for a man with a blanket over his head—that’s Bill Gates, taking a nap." Total bullshit; even then, no-airline would have Bill Gates check in as an economy passenger and not instantly upgrade him and move mere mortals well away from him. The article even talks about Gate's temper just before the coach claim - no-one would risk their career or livelihood by failing to treat him with super-special billionaire status.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  People did run into Bill at the airport eating a burger like anyone else. The couple of times I saw him he didn't appear to have any visible security people. > Even in the early '90s, Microsoft were operating at genius level for their control of public discussion about the company. The company had been around what, 15 years, by then? They weren't newbies at business, and could afford the best PR people.
znkynz 4y ago
https://archive.ph/B0l8g https://archive.ph/B0l8g
kragen 4y ago
it's an amazing testament to bill gates's cluelessness that this entire 12000 word article about writing email over the internet, when the www was already three years old, doesn't mention the word 'internet' even once nor, obviously, 'html', 'web', 'www', 'gopher', or 'ftp'
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  Not cluelessness. The thing is that Gates was trying to build his own, walled garden, version of the internet - MSN. These days people think MSN is a content network, but it started out as a physical, dialup network, a competitor with AOL or CompuServe. Gates didn’t talk about internet technology not because he was clueless, but because he was trying to compete with it.
  - kragen 4y ago
    msn launched in august 01995 and this article is from 01993 (albeit december 01993) maybe msn was in development but this was years before bill's famous fire alarm 'internet tidal wave' email about how the company was totally fucking up by missing out on the internet like a year and a half before https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave/ https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave... it has a paragraph about msn that kind of supports your point that it was intended to be a compuserve-like thing at the time > MSN. The merger of the On-line business and Internet business creates a major challenge for MSN. It can’t just be the place to find Microsoft information on the Internet. It has to have scale and reputation that it is the best way to take advantage of the Internet because of the value added. A lot of the content we have been attracting to MSN will be available in equal or better form on the Internet so we need to consider focusing on areas where we can provide something that will go beyond what the Internet will offer over the next few years. Our plan to promote Blackbird broadly takes away one element that would have been unique to MSN. We need to strengthen the relationship between MSN and Exchange/Cairo for mail, security and directory. We need to determine a set of services that MSN leads in – money transfer, directory, and search engines. Our high-end server offerings may require a specific relationship with MSN.
twobitshifter 4y ago
Wow, what a time warp that article was. I see many parallels between Zuck’s Metaverse and Bill’s information highway. You can try to predict what the future devices will look like, if the idea is already there, but it’s not cohesive enough to make a winning strategy.
- ok123456 4y ago
  Bill didn't invent the 'information superhighway'. That term was coined by Al Gore in the late 70s. By the early 90s it was a pervasive 'meme' used to obliquely refer to the sum of all the available electronic information services. Its cultural currency and relevancy went to zero once everyone had an instantiation of a computer network they could access be it AOL, MSN, or the wider internet. Zuck tried to create the Metaverse out of whole cloth. The thesis is just keep doing what we're already doing, wasting time online, but let's add in some augmented reality and VR headsets!
victor106 4y ago
> My original vision of a personal computer on every desk and every home will take more than 15 years to achieve. 1993+15 = 2008. He was correct but I think he was off by at least 7-8 years..

56 points by pr337h4m 4y ago

"Email is not a good way to get mad at someone since you can’t interact. You can send friendly messages very easily since those are harder to misinterpret." LOL

Shared404 4y ago

> Our email is completely secure. . . . It's very interesting looking back at historical software/communication, and realizing how wrong we have been about so many things, and realizing how wrong we likely are about many others.

adtac 4y ago
Security only makes sense in the context of the technology available to an attacker _at that time_, so I don't think he was wrong. The same way I'm not wrong to say X25519 ECDH is secure even though it's very unlikely we'd still be using it in the year 2100.
- Shared404 4y ago
  True, but wasn't email transmitted unencrypted over the wire back then? That seems like a pretty big leap to call secure even when adjusting for the technology available to attackers at that time.
  - fipar 4y ago
    It was transmitted unencrypted, along with traffic for many other protocols. I have not read the article, but the 1993 note implies this was a time when rsh, telnet, and ftp were still in common use. I don't disagree with you that it's a big leap to call it secure, but my point is I reckon he was not alone making that leap back then.
    - doctor_eval 4y ago
      No, nobody thought email was secure at the time, that statement stood out to me as well. It’s just an example of marketing bullshit, as is the whole article.
  - kragen 4y ago
    yes, and the sender was entirely unauthenticated, bgp was and is entirely unauthenticated, and dns was entirely unauthenticated

dhruvmittal 4y ago

I'm too young to have imagined thinking about Bill Gates the way we think about Zuckerberg today but reading this, it occurs to me that people must have.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Shared404 4y ago
We're probably about the same age, but that is definitely the case! If anything, Gates was likely seen as somewhat worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
- kalu 4y ago
  Hi Mark
  - Shared404 4y ago
    Hah, no, don't get me wrong - Facebook sucks, the Zuck sucks. Full stop. As much as I dislike what Microsoft has done, Facebook is far worse. But I've seen less art of Zuckerberg drawn as a demon coming for your software - though that may just be a difference between the internet now and what I've seen of the internet in the past.
    - hulitu 4y ago
      Microsoft hasn't finished.
- adventured 4y ago
  Gates was widely revered by the public as primarily a positive wunderkind business genius until the later half of the 1990s, when he became particularly richer than everyone else, Microsoft became increasingly powerful, and the robber baron image took over. In the early days he didn't have to survive an era of everything-public as Zuckerberg did (there are no leaked chat logs from when Gates was 19 et al). At 30, most people in the US still didn't know who Gates was (maybe they had heard his name once), much less know anything of consequence about him. Today, if Zuckerberg does or says anything embarrassing, tomorrow hundreds of millions of people will see the headlines and read about it on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. Gates and Microsoft got to ride rather quietly to the top of the tech universe until the mid 1990s. Tech just wasn't nearly so important circa 1980-1990 (vs comparing Microsoft or Apple to GM or McDonalds or Coca Cola today).

RyanShook 4y ago

It’s surprising to me how many tech companies wanted to dominate the TV set top box in the 90s.

10241024 4y ago
Bill Gates was prescient about many things we are living with right now - video-on-demand, online shopping, "wallet PCs" (smartphones), voice recognition, "social interfaces" (Siri, Alexa). I recommend his book The Road Ahead (1995).
msla 4y ago
Java was derived from a language called Oak, which was intended to run on set-top boxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(programming_language) The 1990s had two big things: The Web and cable TV. The smart money was on convergence, which meant that the Web would merge with cable TV and create something entirely new. This happened, kinda, but not in the way people back then imagined; as it turns out, "Cable TV" + "The Internet" = "The Internet" so "Convergence" is just doing everything over an Internet connection.
uni_rule 4y ago
It really is wild to me (with the unquestioned gift of hindsight) that all of these companies saw these massive developments in CPUs, fiber optics, etc. and their immediate reaction was solely a lust for the future in the form of video on demand specifically. Kinda like an inverted form of that alleged Henry Ford quote, if you asked a corporation what they thought the future was then they would say a better TV.

mproud 4y ago

I love the journalist’s email, with uppercase letters and all: 73124.1524@CompuServe.COM I also love how they spell it “E-mail” with a capital E no matter where it is in the sentence.

function_seven 4y ago
Reminds me of when Wired Magazine decided to include the hyphen in their house style [0]. Prior to that they were hip and cool and spelled it as “email”. (I refuse to believe I read that 22 years ago!) [0] https://www.wired.com/2000/10/readers-on-wired-news-style/ https://www.wired.com/2000/10/readers-on-wired-news-style/

discretion22 4y ago

One of the carefully orchestrated PR articles at the height of the investigations into Microsoft. Even in the early '90s, Microsoft were operating at genius level for their control of public discussion about the company. One of my all-time favorite bullshit claims is the "Gates always flies coach when he is traveling on business." and the hilariously ridiculous "Experienced fliers into and out of Seattle know to scan the cabin for a man with a blanket over his head—that’s Bill Gates, taking a nap." Total bullshit; even then, no-airline would have Bill Gates check in as an economy passenger and not instantly upgrade him and move mere mortals well away from him. The article even talks about Gate's temper just before the coach claim - no-one would risk their career or livelihood by failing to treat him with super-special billionaire status.

WalterBright 4y ago
People did run into Bill at the airport eating a burger like anyone else. The couple of times I saw him he didn't appear to have any visible security people. > Even in the early '90s, Microsoft were operating at genius level for their control of public discussion about the company. The company had been around what, 15 years, by then? They weren't newbies at business, and could afford the best PR people.

znkynz 4y ago

https://archive.ph/B0l8g https://archive.ph/B0l8g

kragen 4y ago

it's an amazing testament to bill gates's cluelessness that this entire 12000 word article about writing email over the internet, when the www was already three years old, doesn't mention the word 'internet' even once nor, obviously, 'html', 'web', 'www', 'gopher', or 'ftp'

doctor_eval 4y ago
Not cluelessness. The thing is that Gates was trying to build his own, walled garden, version of the internet - MSN. These days people think MSN is a content network, but it started out as a physical, dialup network, a competitor with AOL or CompuServe. Gates didn’t talk about internet technology not because he was clueless, but because he was trying to compete with it.
- kragen 4y ago
  msn launched in august 01995 and this article is from 01993 (albeit december 01993) maybe msn was in development but this was years before bill's famous fire alarm 'internet tidal wave' email about how the company was totally fucking up by missing out on the internet like a year and a half before https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave/ https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave... it has a paragraph about msn that kind of supports your point that it was intended to be a compuserve-like thing at the time > MSN. The merger of the On-line business and Internet business creates a major challenge for MSN. It can’t just be the place to find Microsoft information on the Internet. It has to have scale and reputation that it is the best way to take advantage of the Internet because of the value added. A lot of the content we have been attracting to MSN will be available in equal or better form on the Internet so we need to consider focusing on areas where we can provide something that will go beyond what the Internet will offer over the next few years. Our plan to promote Blackbird broadly takes away one element that would have been unique to MSN. We need to strengthen the relationship between MSN and Exchange/Cairo for mail, security and directory. We need to determine a set of services that MSN leads in – money transfer, directory, and search engines. Our high-end server offerings may require a specific relationship with MSN.

twobitshifter 4y ago

Wow, what a time warp that article was. I see many parallels between Zuck’s Metaverse and Bill’s information highway. You can try to predict what the future devices will look like, if the idea is already there, but it’s not cohesive enough to make a winning strategy.

ok123456 4y ago
Bill didn't invent the 'information superhighway'. That term was coined by Al Gore in the late 70s. By the early 90s it was a pervasive 'meme' used to obliquely refer to the sum of all the available electronic information services. Its cultural currency and relevancy went to zero once everyone had an instantiation of a computer network they could access be it AOL, MSN, or the wider internet. Zuck tried to create the Metaverse out of whole cloth. The thesis is just keep doing what we're already doing, wasting time online, but let's add in some augmented reality and VR headsets!

victor106 4y ago

> My original vision of a personal computer on every desk and every home will take more than 15 years to achieve. 1993+15 = 2008. He was correct but I think he was off by at least 7-8 years..