Here We Go Again

I first meet Bill Gates while tasked with booking celebrities to promote the UK launch of Windows 95; David Gower, Angela Rippon, Jonathan Ross, Andy Crane, David Emanuel, Carol Vorderman – plus others I will later forget.

Bill is underwhelming – nerdy and beige. Single expression of success, the aspect of the man that will stick in my mind, an embroidered BG on the collar-tip of his diarrhoea-coloured shirt.

Equally unengaging is his lengthy spiel; that everyone will soon own a desktop PC, communicate with ‘e-messages’, and how businesses are going to construct and trade on a World Wide Web (the WWW, or ‘information-superhighway‘ as it is referred to in 1995). But take up is clearly slow and Bill’s MSN dream patently ludicrous. Only Marks and Spencer, Barclays, and Littlewoods (I think) have thus far bought into the new technology, and their ‘websites’ little more than shop window posters – you can’t do anything with them. We shuffle in our seats.

We are issued with pointless ‘e-message’ addresses. Pointless, for no one else has such a thing, so we can only communicate among ourselves, with Microsoft employees, and Bill. We try not to smirk while pocketing our considerable cheques.

Anyway, with limitless free Microsoft software, and being a little nerdy, I undertake to waste some time and build my first pointless business website.

But it isn’t pointless. Bill is right. 27 years later, we all own computing devices, rely upon email, and every individual and business wishing to compete requires a web-presence – even a writer.

So, here I go again, designing another website. A bit of a daunting prospect to be honest. But creating these pages, even for an old fella, is proving considerably less taxing than the technical grapple, the code-editing, blue-screen-inducing, instruction-manual-requiring, never-ending FrontPage 1.0 experience of the mid-nineties.

Bill wasn’t always right though. While launching Windows 98 he told us that photo-quality printing would be the ‘next big thing’. He was wrong. The next big thing would be this screen you’re looking at. The photo-quality display superseded the printer, and in doing so proved Bill Gates fallible.

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