Look at the photo with this column. It’s of an audio microcassette I found in my desk drawer yesterday while madly looking for something else in my overgrown office. As you may be able to read on the picture, it is an interview with Bill Gates from June, 1998. That’s the interview I did for my ill-fated Vanity Fair piece on the relationship between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It is almost sixty minutes entirely devoted to Bill talking about Steve. Quite a historical document, especially since its contents have never been published. And they won’t be here, either, except for one short quote that stood out when I listened to the tape today after […]

Thinking about Ed Roberts, who died last week, reminded me of the best story he ever told me about Bill Gates and Paul Allen, explaining why Gates was always richer than Allen and why that differential may not have been fair. Here’s the short version:

There was a time when Paul Allen, not Bill Gates, was the boss at Microsoft. When it came time to visit Albuquerque to demonstrate that first BASIC interpreter to the folks at MiTS, Allen made the trip, not Gates. It was Paul Allen, not Gates, who was later offered the job as head of software for MiTS — a job I have in the past characterized as the single most expensive […]