YABGT (Yet Another Bill Gates Tribute)

I will join all of the other bloggers out there and put in my two cents about Bill Gates.

I had my first and only brush with Gates back in 1991 or 1992. I was a contributing editor for Microsoft Systems Journal back in the old days. One day, I get a call from my editor. He tells me that Bill Gates is stopping in New York for a night, on his way back to Seattle from a European trip. He wanted to have dinner with the MSJ contributing editors to tell them about some exciting stuff in the industry. Would I be interested?

We all met at a Japanese hotel on Park Ave at 32nd St. This hotel had a beautiful restaurant, and Gates, being a sushi fanatic, reserved a tatani room for us.

We all get there at 8PM, and then in walks Gates, followed by his flack, Jon Lazarus (who used to be the publisher of MSJ). In attendance was myself, Ross Greenburg (author of RamNet, and later, some virus-checking program), Greg Comeau (author of Comeau C++), Charles Petzold (author of a book), and Tony Rizzo (my editor).

Gates turned out to be a great guy, despite the constant leg movements under the table. Very personable. He spent most of the night talking about getting Dave Cutler from DEC, and the new operating system he was working on (Windows NT). Every word was preceeded by a stern warning from Lazarus never to repeat what was said.

Of course, the very next week, PC Week featured a big story on Cutler and NT!!!

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