Bill Gates, Chairman of the Board of Microsoft, first learned of the Macintosh from Steve Jobs in June 1981. By January 1982, a full two years before the machine's introduction, Gates and a team of programmers were writing Mac software and participating in the Mac's development. Their goal was to have a range of software tools including Microsoft BASIC, Multiplan, and other application packages ready for the Mac's launch or soon thereafter.

Microsoft's roots in the computer industry go deep. The company has made major contributions to the success of many of personal computing's most popular machines. Most notable has been the operating system for the IBM Personal Computer (MS-DOS, aka PC-DOS), which has become the standard for 16-bit personal computers. Today Microsoft software is used on over five million personal computers worldwide.

Because of his unique experience, Gates is ideally positioned to understand both the history and the future development of personal computing. In this interview, Macworld Publisher David Bunnell learns why Gates has already declared the Macintosh to be a "classic."

Bunnell: When I interviewed you for PC Magazine's inaugural issue in January 1982, you said the IBM Personal Computer was not a machine you would buy for your mother. How do you feel about the Macintosh?

Gates: The Macintosh is far easier to use than anything we've seen before, especially because of what it's letting the software do. Although some of the Mac's techniques and features can be found on earlier machines, the Mac heralds a major change in how people view and interact with application programs. That's why I'm so excited about it. There's no question that I'll let my mom try it out.

Bunnell: Why can't you do the same things on the PC? What is so special about the Macintosh?

Gates: The Mac was designed as a graphics machine. Apple didn't put in a ROM character generator or a bunch of video modes. They put in only one video mode, and that's the pure bit-mapped, 512- by 342-pixel screen. The monitor was designed into the machine so that they could get extremely crisp pictures and have one integrated system. They knew what the aspect ratio was and how the dots would appear. And they also made sure that the mouse would be used and that the 64K ROM would support very rich graphics interaction.

You can configure a PC with one of the better graphics boards and add a Microsoft mouse and the necessary software, but that's not the thrust of the machine. The PC is used primarily in its text mode, and to date it's used mostly without a mouse; you couldn't get performance or graphics like the Mac's out of the PC at a comparable price. Although they're both "turing" machines (that is, they have finite memory), the thrust of the Mac is quite different.

Of all the personal computers available today; the Mac is unique. It's the first time somebody said, "We don't need a lot of the things that other personal computers have, so let's optimize a few areas and make sure the software is designed around them."

Bunnell: When did you first become aware of the Macintosh?

Gates: I talked to Steve Jobs about the Macintosh project in June 1981. We were excited about developing new software and somewhat disappointed that we weren't more involved in the Lisa's development. We thought Apple ought to do a cheaper version of the Lisa, and we didn't think the machine had to have so much memory. We also thought we could move some of our software over, and we'd always wanted to have a machine with a straight bit map.

Steve offered to show us what he was doing on a confidential basis. We went to Cupertino in October 1981 and saw a running prototype. It was running a simple bouncing-ball program, but even so it was impressive, and they were talking about a very aggressive price. We actually signed a contract to work together in January 1982, and agreed to devote a lot of good people to developing a full range of productivity tools for the Mac.

Bunnell: Can you tell us something about the nature of your involvement? Is it just creating application programs?

Gates: No, we've had a very in-depth involvement. Whenever you get involved with prototype machines that early on, you are essentially part of the engineering team; you're helping to find bugs and making suggestions for design changes. Microsoft has been an extension of the internal Mac software team for the last few years. We've had a close working relationship with the Mac team that has been beneficial for both sides. We've learned a great deal about doing graphics applications, and we've made sure that their subsystem, dialog boxes, and memory manager fit in properly.

If you compared the Mac to what it was two years ago, you probably wouldn't recognize it. Steve's vision of where the machine should go—that it should be a simple, inexpensive graphics machine has been preserved. But the disk, the memory, the code in ROM, the number of bits on the screen—they're all different. We didn't realize that we needed to do so much work with the memory manager, menus, and dialog boxes. Nor did we know how we were going to make the Finder work or how the desktop tools would work. All of these things eventually got built into the software that Apple includes with the system.

Microsoft's Multiplan was running over a year and a half ago on the Mac. You could do recalcs, resize the sheet by moving the mouse around, and other things. We thought we'd be finished with that product in a few months, and in fact everyone's schedules were overly optimistic. But the product has evolved since then. We started to use the graphics much more, changed the way scroll bars work, and altered the way data is passed between applications. We also sped it up considerably and made sure that the worksheet size would be adequate.

Look at MacPaint, the program that Bill Atkinson did internally at Apple. It was impressive a year and a half ago, but it wasn't even close to what it is today. It's been polished up since then. For example, the spray can was included about nine months ago. Every time we'd meet with Apple, we'd show them our new stuff, and they'd show us theirs. We'd tell them that if we wanted to do something even better, we'd need more support in the ROM.

As with any ROM, you keep trying to freeze the thing, because it's got to be extremely reliable and there's a size limit. You also have to consider the lead time for masking. Four or five times Apple said to us, "OK, this is the final ROM."

Bunnell: You mentioned the memory size. How do you feel about the whole memory issue—is it enough for your applications?

Gates: It's certainly enough memory. The Mac started out with 64K, which is one-sixteenth of what the Lisa started out with. Because the Mac's bit map is smaller than the Lisa's, we thought we could do something with that amount of memory. But we were pushing for 128K all the way, and about a year ago we switched to 128K. We figured out how to squeeze the applications down to that size.

When you're writing applications that are going to be simple to use, it's important to have some boundaries that prevent you from throwing in an unlimited number of features; the memory size provides that limit. Certainly what we've got in terms of Multichart, Multifile, Multiplan, and Microsoft BASIC on the Mac are as rich as on any other machine we've seen. I think the people at Apple would openly admit that Plan, File, and Chart are more powerful than their equivalents on the Lisa, and yet they run on an eighth as much memory. When you do get more memory, you'll be able to have multiple applications active or have more data space available. It's partly these boundaries that have forced us to find more clever ways to do things and stay within the memory size. It's caused us to be more innovative than we would have been if we'd had a megabyte.

Bunnell: What programming techniques do you use to work within the memory limit?

Gates: You've got ta take advantage of what's in the ROM and learn to do very tight code. It's not simple to write software for the Mac. Over time, as really good program development tools emerge, people will become proficient at writing programs for the Mac.

Look at the Apple II. It took about two years before people were really exploiting its capabilities. If you look at the IBM PC, products such as Microsoft Word, Flight Simulator, or 1-2-3 took a year and a half to emerge. That's because you've got to get the tools together—you have to understand how to push the machine to its limit. I think we started that cycle much earlier with the Mac, Maybe a year and a half from now I'll say, "Wow, even I didn't realize the Mac could do this newer stuff!" For example, some facilities are available for music in the Mac that we're not using well yet. And there's even talk about how that capability could be extended to include voice synthesis. In the peripherals area, the Mac has those two RS-422 ports, and nobody's really exploiting them yet.

Bunnell: What impact do you think the Macintosh will have on personal computing?

Gates: I think the Mac will mean that there's at least one company besides IBM in the personal computer business that doesn't have to do everything the IBM way. It's healthy for the industry to have Apple offering an alternative. The Apple II and the IBM PC will be joined by a third fantastically successful machine—the Mac—so we're expecting to develop a lot of software for it. It's more than just the Mac's hardware and software that's being approached in an innovative way—some innovative work is being done in terms of getting sales people and college students involved with this machine.

The reason people like the computer business is that it's innovative. We've got to continue to experiment with how computers are built and come up with new ideas, or else this industry isn't going to stay as exciting and fast moving as it is now. I've always said that the Mac is an ideal machine for office use, but it's also a great general purpose machine. We think it will address several markets and remind people that the pace of innovation hasn't slowed down in the industry.

Bunnell: Do you think the Mac is going to change the way people use computers?

Gates: We've always promised people that they could simply buy a computer, turn it on, and use it. Even the Mac doesn't fulfil this promise, but it's a new milestone in terms of usability. The way the menus and graphics work is so compelling that you're enticed to learn that next feature—you want to try it out and see if it works the way you think it should. The Mac has so little hidden behavior that it will attract a new class of users.

Many people have held back, thinking that computers are complicated, mathematical, scientific-type machines; they haven't viewed them as a medium of expression, as machines with which you can do creative things, But many people will sit down and use MacPaint or Multichart and realize that the Mac is not confined to the computer stereotype. I'll enjoy having some people I know who are new to computers play with the Mac and see if it doesn't draw them into the excitement of interactive personal computing.

Bunnell Do you plan to have programs such as Flight Simulator on the Mac?

Gates: We're working on many products, and Flight Simulator is certainly a good product. Bruce Artwick originally did Flight Simulator for the Apple II. He pushed the Apple II to its limit and proved that the machine could do many things that people didn't think it could do. When the IBM PC came out, Bruce proved that the PC could do many things that people didn't think were possible. Now he's taken on the challenge of proving to all of us that the Mac can do things that we don't think are possible. He's talked about things like shading and surfaces, and about getting more realism into the program than what's in the PC version. Certainly within the next year he'll generate another fantastic program.

Bunnell: What about the lack of color? You have all of these beautiful graphics but no color.

Gates: The perfect machine will never exist, and the obvious difference between the perfect machine and the Mac is that you could ask for more memory, color, and a faster way to move data in and out of the machine. But when you look at price, you'll acknowledge that this machine is incredible, The Mac is an 8 MHz 68000 machine; if you take a PCjr, configure it up, and set it side by side with the Mac, there will be more than a three-to-one difference in raw horsepower. Since the PCjr has about two-thirds the horsepower of a PC, the Mac has easily twice that of a PC. That's a lot of power, and that power can be exploited in many ways, including moving bits around on the screen.

If Apple had tried to put color in this machine, it wouldn't have been available for a few years, because we'd need three times as many bits for the screen and more memory. We'd have to use 256K chips, and the design of our applications would be different. I think Apple made the right trade-off, but someday a Mac or the equivalent of a Mac with color would be wonderful.

Bunnell: Some people have predicted that the Macintosh is going to be a classic. Do you think that's correct?

Gates: The Mac is fun and exciting, and it fulfils Apple's image of producing very personal, interactive, state-of-the-art computers, It's a blend of Apple's knowledge of what personal computing should be and what the semiconductor industry has made possible, It's a great mixture, and it's something that Apple is perfectly positioned to sell to people. The Mac will be remembered as one of the great classic machines. ☕