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When Bill went down memory lane!

Fakir Chand in Bangalore

For Bill Gates, the world's richest man and chairman-cum-chief software architect of $28 billion Microsoft, the maiden flying visit to Bangalore on Wednesday turned out to be both hectic and exciting.

Though the 46-year-old Gates reached India's Silicon Valley of India on late Tuesday night from Delhi and checked into the posh 7-star Leela Palace for rest, his day began with a 20-minute extempore speech at the sprawling Infosys campus in the electronic city.

Organised by Nasscom along with Microsoft India, and titled "Bill Gates Live", the gathering of about 3000 young software developers, including hundreds of Infoscians, set the stage for a standing ovation to the pioneer of Windows, Internet Explorer, MS Office and .Net.

After the customary welcome address by Nasscom president Kiran Karnik and vice-president Som Mittal of Digital Globalsoft, Gates began his address by telling the techies -- both young and old - how excited and thrilled he was to be in Bangalore and the great Infosys campus.

Going down memory lane, Gates recalled his younger days when he dropped out of Harvard University as a sophomore to begin tinkering with the earlier versions of computers, which were run on disc operating systems.

Addressing the software developers, Gates said:

"About 27 years ago, when I was 19 years old, I had a dream to make computing different and faster than what it was then. We (Steve Balmer and I) were fascinated with computers at such a young age and wanted to write programs to make them do different things.

"As easy access to computers was difficult in those days, we used to go to the university during the nights for exploring what more could be done to make them do more than merely keying text and making automatic calculations.

"Within months, we were thrilled to discover that computers could be used as a tool for human creativity and apply them for various day-to-day functions from office to business to entertainment.

"Subsequently, it was the creation of micro-processors that brought about a revolution in the power of computing. I consider micro processing as a miracle technology as it unraveled the potential of computers and networking.

"Going by the Moor's Law, the quantum jump in the computing power of micro processors, we were able to break the barrier of creating software for making desktop computers by miniaturising the functions of a Unix platform into a Windows platform on an Intel mother board.

"Though computer manufacturers at that time were having their own proprietary-driven operating systems and tools, there was no common software code that could be used by multiple players by migration.

"Building software to run applications, Microsoft made use of the evolving microprocessors to develop the Windows version, followed by the Internet Protocols.

"The computer technology explosion during the eighties and the nineties made us think that the growth of the software industry would outpace that of its hardware counterpart. But it did not happen, thanks to more hype and over valuation of software companies.

"After the Y2K, and the short-lived dot.com boom, there has been a deflation in the software industry. Though the Internet revolution heralded a new era with the net becoming the nerve center of all activity, the dream of making it (the Internet Protocol) a universal platform has taken a beating in the recent past."

In order to make the converging technologies affordable and more accessible, Gates said the industry would have to build new software tools and wider platform.

In this context, Gates referred to the potential of the Indian software industry in capitalising the opportunities of outsourcing and innovation.

"India has in it to emerge as the global hub of mission critical applications, thanks to the quality of engineers who come out of excellent engineering colleges," Gates asserted.

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