The cold mists creep in from the sea and the unrelenting rains keep that northwestern valley perpetually blanketed in a dank, unwholesome shroud. Perhaps it is only this that makes me shudder when I think of that place, or perhaps it is the ineradicable memory of what I saw on that dreary morning in December.
I was working in my library on an obscure point of computer lore when my cousin Corbett dropped in. He had recently taken on the responsibility of conducting a science-fiction and fantasy writing workshop for computer programmers in Silicon Valley, he explained, and had come seeking advice on writing assignments.
Unsure what sort of advice he wanted and wishing to get back to my work, I pressed upon him the first book that came to hand, Manes and Andrews' biography of Bill Gates. At first skeptical, he began to brighten as he paged through the volume.
"Yes, yes, I think I can use this," he said. I watched him go and thought no more about the matter.
The winds whipped up from the seacoast to my mountain retreat that December, driving the coastal fog even up to my little aerie and putting me in mind of another, more sinister, place. One overcast morning, my cousin Corbett returned with a manila envelope and a bemused expression.
"I gave them the old alternate-universe, what-if assignment," he said, spreading the contents of the envelope across my desk. "I put the Gates bio on reserve and told them to consider the consequences of changing one key detail in the history of Microsoft."
"Sounds fascinating," I muttered, extracting my notes from under his papers.
"They apparently thought so. They turned in some interesting stories, but there's something about them--well, see for yourself."
It was clear that I wouldn't be rid of him until I had read his students' stories, so I picked up the nearest, settled back in my chair, and began. I read: "'No, you may not drop out of college to start a software company,'" Mary 'Giggles' Gates told her eager, bespectacled son Bill...."
I'll spare you the student prose. The story told of bespectacled Bill's years at Harvard, culminating in a meeting in his senior year with another student, Dan Bricklin, who has an idea for a software product. The two form a company, VisiCalc is a spectacular success, and Gates emerges as the billionaire puppetmaster of the software universe. I turned to the next story.
This story assumed that Gary Kildall did not go flying when IBM came to Digital Research for an operating system for its new personal computer. As a result, DRI rather than Microsoft becomes IBM's system-software partner. Soon, though, Kildall, tired of CP/M, throws his company's efforts into a new operating system IBM proposes; immediately, DRI is mired in OS/2 and Microsoft is selling a CP/M alternative called MS-DOS to clonemakers and plowing the profits into a marketing blitz for a new graphical operating environment called Windows. Gates becomes a billionaire and Microsoft dominates the industry. I started flipping through the other stories.
In one, Apple wins its look-and-feel suit against Microsoft. This forces cosmetic changes in Windows that marketing explains as a new and improved windows, for a huge boost in sales.
In another, IBM buys Microsoft, only to spin it off as a separate company in its 1992 reorganization. Gates rides out the changes and prospers.
Three stories had Ross Perot buying Microsoft, something he actually considered and now regrets passing up. In one, he takes the company public, then leaves in a huff over a disagreement with the board of directors. In another, he is forced out by IBM, which wants to work with Microsoft but has unpleasant memories of Perot. In the third, he resigns to run for President. In each story, Bill Gates steps in at the critical juncture and both he and Microsoft prosper beyond the dreams of avarice.
They were all like that. MITS retains control of Microsoft Basic, but Gates, noticing that the entire microcomputer word-processing market is owned by one programmer who started business with an unlisted phone number, borrows money from his family, and buys Michael Shrayer's Electric Pencil, beefing up the company and the product; WordStar never happens. Young system-hacker Gates is arrested and does time in a juvenile correctional facility in Washington, but uses all the free time to write versions of Basic for every known microprocessor and sell them by mail.
"Here's the one that gives me the willies," Corbett said, passing me the last of the stories.
It was a long, rambling narrative, starting out in the European theater of World War II and ending in an obscure laboratory in the Pacific northwest. But I followed it with unhealthy fascination and a growing sense of horror, reading of the young second lieutenant tragically killed in battle, the wealthy family intent on keeping its line alive, the unspeakable experiment performed in that noxious laboratory just before Halloween in 1955, and the strange child that was the result. I threw it into the fire.
The wind is rising again tonight, and I sit here in my library staring out into the impenetrable fog, musing on the unknowable designs of a strange and terrible universe.
Copyright © 1993, Dr. Dobb's Journal