March 6, 1984: Through the Gates of the Future

When Bill Gates first saw the Mac he knew he had glimpsed the future of computing. Microsoft invested heavily in programming for the GUI based interface. How excited was Bill by the prospect of a GUI interface? Microsoft began working on its own version of a GUI soon after Bill saw the Mac.

Privately Microsoft might have been waiting for the Mac to fail, but publicly things were quite different. For example:

"If Macintosh isn't a success then the market is let to the PC. But we're super enthusiastic. If Apple can meet its production goals, we expect half of Microsoft's retail sales to be Macintosh related in 1984."

Bill Gates’s super quote was published this month in Popular Science in 1984.