Reading The Road Ahead 19 Years Later – Chapter 4: Applications and Appliances

Thirty years ago the United States Supreme Court decided that personal recordings were fair use and that selling a device (the VCR) that has substantial non-infringing uses is lawful even if it could be used to infringe. In chapter four of The Road Ahead, Bill Gates pondered the digital future and the evolution of computers. …

Reading The Road Ahead 19 Years Later – Chapter 3: Lessons from the Computer Industry

It’s been nearly fourteen years since Bill Gates resigned from his position as Microsoft CEO. He was succeeded by Steve Ballmer, who recently announced his own retirement. In the intervening years, the computer revolution opened a new front: mobile and connected devices. The Road Ahead was published nearly five years before Gates would pass the …

Reading The Road Ahead 19 Years Later – Chapter 2: The Beginning of the Information Age

The first time I heard the term “Information Age” I was tantalized. I knew about the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, periods of history named for the new materials men used to make their tools and weapons. Those were specific eras. Then I read academics predicting that countries will be fighting over the control …

Reading The Road Ahead 19 Years Later – Chapter One: A Revolution Begins

When Bill Gates wrote The Road Ahead he looked back on the previous twenty years of his life, Microsoft, and the history of computing, while considering where that path would take society. Windows 95 was a new revolution in computing, the Internet was still in its infancy, and the original Pentium processor was king of …

Book Review: Star Wars: Scoundrels

(It’s been a bit since I’ve done one of these, not for lack of reading, so hopefully this will get me back in the spirit, and in control of the backlog.) The Star Wars theme is one of the most iconic musical pieces of the 20th century. Among science fiction novelists, Timothy Zahn’s works are …