In a nice post on the announced retirement of Bill Gates John was asking how Bill Gates had impacted our lives.
During my studies I had the opportunity to work with real computers and got totally addicted. When I finished in 1984 my access to these wonderful machines stopped. There were home computers but none of them were serious enough to do the things I wanted to keep doing. In the same year IBM introduced the Personal Computer, but took it for a souped-up type writer. To get the thing rolling they licensed something from a young nerd who did believe in the possibilities, had the vision where it could go and produced something which did work: Bill Gates. My first own machine was an Olivetti running MicroSoft Disk Operating System 2.11. The rest is history.
But Bill Gates, as the face of Microsoft, has given me more than just tools to get myself a profession. As a kid I had always been crazy about airplanes and flying. Flying myself had always been far out of reach. With the first PC came also the first edition of Microsoft Flight simulator. It took some imagination to see an airplane in the rough 320*200 green wire frames and using the numeric keypad as a stick is far from the real world. But I finally got a chance to fly! And I still do it on a regular basis, now with an MS FF joystick. For entertainment most of you are probably shooting up aliens in (also Microsoft) Halo. I like to chase Zero's or Messerschmidt's in MS CSFx.
A weird coincidence: the day Bill Gates announced his retirement I visited my first real big air show. For the other flying geeks over there a snapshot of another historical moment over there:
The Blue Angels flying formation with the Red Arrows.
Would I have been there without Bill? Probably not.