Bill Gates on the Next 40 Years in Technology

For PC Magazine's charter issue(Opens in a new window) 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!),