Bill Gates' Web Site - Speech Transcript, Supercomputing 05 Conference

Bill Gates' Web Site - Speech Transcript, Supercomputing 05 Conference: "Well, it may seem strange to have somebody that works at the very lowest end of computing here addressing the supercomputing audience. My earliest work was writing the BASIC interpreter that would run in a 4-K-byte machine, and I spend day and night trying to find any little byte that I could save so that the interpreter, the data, everything could run in that small, little kit computer, which was called the Altair.
Well, that very low cost computing led to high volume personal computing, and today we have over 800 million of those machines in use, really moving towards the original vision of a computer on every desk and in every home.
Now, this has meant that software has moved to the center. It's moved to the center for communications, for creativity, for visualization, and it's amazing to see how far software has come and yet how much more we need to do. In terms of security, ease of use, high level descriptions software really is just at the beginning."