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Club Introduction

Welcome to today's meeting of The Commonwealth Club of California, broadcast from the Marriott Hotel in San Francisco. I am Watson Laetsch, your quarterly chair. It is my pleasure to extend an invitation to all of our listeners across the country to join us here at The Commonwealth Club whenever they are visiting San Francisco.

And now for today's speaker. It is a rare conversation about personal computers where Windows isn't mentioned. Mention Windows and you think of Microsoft. Mention Windows or Microsoft and you think of Bill Gates. His visibility is not surprising since he co-founded Microsoft only 18 years ago, when he was 20 years old. Microsoft is now the world's leading provider of software for personal computers, and last year, it had net revenues of 2.8 billion dollars. As a result, Microsoft has been called the most influential technological company in the world.

William H. Gates III started along his information pathway almost 38 years ago in Seattle, Washington. His programming career commenced at 13, and a few years later he developed BASIC while an undergraduate at Harvard. His predilection for being the first provides great credibility to his visions of the future. He considers today's electronic information systems to be a rough track compared to the electronic superhighway, which will dramatically change how we obtain information over the next decade. It is predicted that this superhighway will change the way we conduct business, shop, obtain a great variety of services, entertain ourselves and run political campaigns. It might even have an impact on literacy and learning.

Large investments will be required to build this highway, but the financial rewards could be enormous, hence the jockeying for position to influence traffic, exemplified by the recent merger of Bell Atlantic and Telecommunications Inc. Bill Gates, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft Corporation, will speak on the business and social impact of the information highway. Bill Gates.

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