Among questions on his favorite sandwiches (“Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger”) and whether he can still jump over a chair (probably not), Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates got asked whether his company had copied Steve Jobs during a Reddit Q&A on Monday.
Gates denied copying Cupertino — but reminded everybody that Microsoft and Apple both borrowed liberally from another Silicon Valley pioneer.
Today marks the 88th birthday of professor Thomas Kurtz, who invented the BASIC programming language with his colleague John Kemeny.
To mark the occasion, the iOS and Apple Watch port of DONKEY.APP, a game originally programmed in BASIC by none other than Bill Gates, has been made temporarily available for free by its developers.
What better way to celebrate Kurtz’s birthday than by playing the modern port of a clunky old 1981 driving game?
Before Bill Gates was, well, Bill Gates, he was the 20-something software developer behind DONKEY.BAS, a simple yet frustratingly difficult PC game in which players drive a car along a stretch of road while avoiding donkeys.
Created in 1981 to show off the BASIC programming language on the then-new IBM PC, an updated version of the game has now been ported to Apple Watch.
Tim Cook was apparently considered as a possible running mate for Hillary Clinton, according to a new email released by WikiLeaks.
Written by Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, the email includes a number of high-profile names touted as potential vice presidential candidates, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
Today marks Tim Cook’s five-year anniversary as the CEO of Apple after Steve Jobs resigned, and as a reward for making it this long in the top spot he just unlocked a monster bonus.
If you’ve long dreamed of seeing the epic tech rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates staged as a Broadway musical, written by two of the writers from Cartoon Network’s Robot Chicken (and who hasn’t?), well, I’m afraid you’ll be waiting a bit longer.
That’s because the somewhat unflatteringly-titled Nerds has seen its Broadway opening — originally scheduled for April — cancelled after one of the sources of funding pulled out of the project.
We’re decades removed from Bill Gates’ vicious battle against Steve Jobs, but Gates isn’t quite as ready as some of his contemporaries to side with Apple concerning one of tech’s biggest stories of 2016.
In a new interview, Gates defies Silicon Valley consensus, arguing that Apple should create an FBI backdoor for the iPhone — and siding with FBI director James Comey by suggesting that this wouldn’t, in fact, set a dangerous precedent for the possibility of future snooping.
Bill Gates has a song in his heart for the late Steve Jobs. Yes, they were fierce rivals as they pioneered products that revolutionized personal computing, but the competition mellowed into a good friendship.
So when Gates, in an interview on BBC show Desert Island Discs, was asked to choose eight songs and why they are meaningful to him, he had one picked out for Jobs — “Two of Us” by The Beatles.
A new musical comedy coming to Broadway this April will spotlight none other than the two rivals for PC dominance, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Rather obviously titled Nerds, the new musical will feature some of the technology the two men helped foster, including onstage holograms, projection mapping and an app that lets audiences decide what ending they’d like to see.
“Me and My Other Me” is a series of illustrated portraits of celebrities. The roster of folks drawn up include tech giants like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as well as music mega-stars like Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson.
What makes them creepy–aside from the highly detailed cartoonish art style, that is–is that they’re portraits of both younger and older versions of the subjects.
Just take a look at a few of these disturbing pieces of art below and you’ll see what I mean.
Tim Cook and Eddy Cue were in Sun Valley, Idaho this week for Allen & Co’s annual gathering of the richest and most successful people in media and technology. The gathering includes multiple days of hobnobbing with fellow elites where Cook has become a staple for the past two years.
Last year Apple’s CEO made headlines by telling a reporter to throw her Samsung away. This year Cook was mum when reporters asked him questions, but he was spotted chatting with some of his fellow tech titans, like Microsoft founder Bill Gates:
Apple head Tim Cook has donated 50,000 of his shares in the company to an undisclosed charity, according to an SEC filing Friday. The donation has a value of $6.54 million, as of this writing.
We’ve had a new Steve Jobs biography and documentary already this year, with a movie biopic based on the Walter Isaacson book just around the corner.
If you thought Jobs’ life hadn’t been explored enough by biographers, however, think again! The National Geographic Channel is getting ready to a air a new documentary series called American Genius, which will explore famous business rivalries throughout history.
And it’s kicking off with an episode about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Bill Gates may never have creatively made the same impact on computing that Steve Jobs did, but we doubt he’s too upset about it, since according to Forbes‘ newly-published annual ranking of global billionaires, the former Microsoft mastermind-turned-philanthropist is once again the world’s richest person.
And you know what the crazy bit is? Gates earned more money last year from his return on capital than he ever did from Microsoft wages. Wowza!
If you’re a long time Mac fan like I am, you probably remember a time in the 90’s when you would have paid anything to watch then Microsoft CEO eat shit and die.
Of course, since leaving Microsoft, Bill Gates has become quite the humanitarian… one who is especially concerned with the problem of getting clean drinking water to the rest of the world. So these days, I have no interest in seeing him eat shit and die.
But drink shit and live? Sign me up!
We’re nearly a week away from ringing in the new year and all the craziness that 2015 is going to bring with it, but before we go into holiday hibernation mode, we wanted to take a look back at the most GIF-worthy events of 2014.
From Ellen’s hilarious Oscar selfie, to ‘the greatest catch ever’, 2014 was filled with incredible moments that captured the Internet’s fascination thanks to the glory of the GIFs.
Without further adieu, these were our favorite GIFs of 2014:
In a delightful little video from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the tech billionaire and philanthropist talks about the favorite books he’s read this year. It’s an eclectic collection: Thomas Piketty’s volume on income inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century shares equal space with fiction novel The Rosie Effect as well as a book from the late 1970s, Business Adventures, by John Brooks. It’s a rare insight into the mind of one of our biggest business and cultural leaders of the last several decades.
Check out the video below for the whole list, and a charmingly presented stop-motion Lego film starring Bill Gates himself.
In the timeless game of hating on Apple, Bill Gates is an O.G. When his kids ask for iPads and MacBooks, he shoves a Microsoft Surface in their stockings. But when it comes to Apple Pay, even the former CEO of Microsoft thinks his old rivals’ mobile payments solution is absolutely fantastic.
In an interview discussing his latest philanthropic endeavor – leveraging cellphones to make banking more affordable for the world’s poorest countries – Gates told Bloomberg TV that he sees Apple Pay bringing NFC payments to a critical mass for all devices in the near future.
“The fact that in any application I can buy something, that’s fantastic,” Gates gushed. “The fact I don’t need a physical card anymore… and you’re going to be quite sure about who it is on the other end, that is a real contribution.”
Yeah, Bill. We’re impressed too. Check out the full interview below:
Less than an hour ago, Microsoft founder and super rich guy Bill Gates took the ice bucket challenge, which has various famous folks dumping cold water over their heads to raise awareness for Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS).
While Tim Cook completed the challenge himself at an Apple employee event, Bill Gates has gone even further — he built a crazy contraption to dump a ton of ice water on his head. The video (below) shows his planning attempts, complete with Comic Sans blueprints and a Surface tablet to do all the work and YouTubery.
Watch the full video below:
Last night Bill Gates jumped onstage at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to talk about how he’s curing the world of polio as well as the next big tech ideas – weirdly there was no mention of an iWatch. What begins as a gushing interview takes an awkward turn when the former King of Windows starts eying Jimmy’s MacBook at the of his desk corner.
Watch the awkward exchange in full glory below:
UPDATE: Sadly, as pointed out by one of our readers and then corroborated, it seems that Bill Gates didn’t after all buy an iPad — although the rest of the story stands. The confusion came from the apology on behalf of user NY1227 for including an iPad on her wishlist.
Here’s an idea: take one subject like tech with a massive built-in fanbase, and another — like Broadway musicals — with a similarly rabid audience.
Put them together and what do you get? Well, the hope is obviously for a hit, but right now the specific answer is “Nerds” — a new musical from the Philadelphia Theatre Company, telling the oft-repeated story of Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs.
Last night’s South Park episode depicted a shirtless Bill Gates — revealing the Microsoft co-founder to have a tattoo reading “RIP Steve Jobs 2011.”
Microsoft has today announced that chief executive officer Steve Ballmer will retire “within the next 12 months.” Ballmer will continue to carry out his role while the company seeks a successor, aiding its transformation into a devices and services company — but he will depart once a suitable replacement is found.
For a long time, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were two of the biggest competitors in the technology industry. They were both early pioneers of desktop computing, and their companies were battling each other for every ounce of market share they could get their hands on.
But those shared experiences eventually led to the two becoming good friends. In a new interview for CBS’ 60 Minutes, Gates fondly remembers his old foe, and emotionally recalls his last visit to Jobs’s Palo Alto home before he passed away in October 2011.