Windows is a graphical user interface, or GUI (computer people pronounce it “gooey”). Instead of operating the computer with keyboard commands, as you do in DOS, in Windows you use a pointing device—a mouse—to access little folders and documents on your electronic desktop. Xerox developed the desktop metaphor in the late seventies, and in the early eighties Apple Computer commercialized it. Gates saw that Apple’s GUI was an easier system to use than DOS, and borrowed it. When Windows first appeared, it was widely viewed as a kludge (a dog): it was buggy (it had glitches) and was a memory pig (it used up a lot of space in the computer’s hard drive), and it was generally less elegant than Apple’s GUI. But Gates stayed with Windows and kept improving it. Gates understood that it did not matter if the software used lots of space on the hard drive as long as hard drives kept getting twice as powerful every eighteen months. Also, whereas Apple chose to keep its software proprietary—it could run only on machines that Apple made—Gates licensed Windows to any computer manufacturer that wanted it, just as he had done with DOS. When Apple realized its mistake—its strategy limited Apple’s share of the operating system market to the number of computers Apple could sell—it sued Microsoft for copyright infringement, but a federal court ruled that “the look and feel” of the desktop metaphor was not covered under Apple’s copyright.

It is often said by Gates’ detractors that he has never invented anything, and this is true in a sense, but you could say the same thing about Henry Ford. When the Model T appeared, in 1908, it was by no means the best car on the road, but it worked well enough, and it was affordable and easy to produce, and Ford stayed with it. Even today, most users still find Apple’s operating system more intuitive than Windows, but, because the market for Windows is so much larger, other software manufacturers are more inclined to make applications for Windows than for Apple’s operating system. If there is to be a standard computer language—which from the point of view of the public is greatly desirable—it now appears that Windows will be the one. But Gates has to worry that someone will do to Microsoft what Microsoft did to Apple. Apple is designing a new operating system with I.B.M.; it’s code-named Pink, and is expected to appear sometime in 1995.

After a month of E-mail between Gates and me, my hour in his physical presence arrived. As we shook hands, he said, “Hello, I’m Bill Gates,” and emitted a low, vaguely embarrassed chuckle. Is this the sound one E-mailer makes to another when they finally meet in real space? I was aware of a feeling of being discovered. In the front part of Gates’ office, we sat down at right angles to each other. Gates had on normal-looking clothes—a green shirt with purple stripes, brown pants, black loafers. He rocked throughout our time together. He did not look at me very often but either looked down as he was talking or lifted his eyes above my head to look out the window in the direction of the campus. The angle of the light caused the purple stripes in his shirt to reflect in his glasses, which, in turn, threw an indigo tinge into the dark circles around his eyes.

The emotional boundaries of our encounter seemed to have been much expanded by the E-mail that preceded it: Gates would be angry one minute, almost goofily happy the next. I wondered if he was consciously using our present form of communication to express feelings that E-mail cannot convey. Maybe this is the way lots of people will communicate in the future: meet on the information highway, exchange messages, get to know the lining of each other’s mind, then meet face to face. In each other’s physical presence, they will be able to eliminate a lot of the polite formalities that clutter people’s encounters now, and say what they really mean. If this happens, it will be a good thing about the information highway: electronic communication won’t reduce face-to-face communication; instead, it will focus it.

I had been told not to ask Gates about his marriage, because he didn’t want to talk about it, but I was emboldened by the familiarity that E-mail had established between us and asked anyway. Gates was silent, rocking gently (I interpreted that as a good sign) and staring down at his shoes. “Well, it’s a pretty conventional marriage,” he said after a while. “I’m male, and I’m marrying a female. And there’s just two of us. And we plan to have rings on our fingers. And there’ll be a minister. Or, actually, a priest, I think. Since I’m marrying a Catholic.” He giggled. “Pretty standard stuff. In most dimensions, including this one, I’m just like everybody else. I found a girl and fell in love with her. I’m kind of old.” As he talked, he began to make a peculiar ahhh sound—a sort of rapturous vocalized pause, with a little shyness in it, as if he were confiding in me.

“Some of your competitors are hoping that marriage is going to make you spend less time in the office,” I said.

“Yeah, I think . . . ahhh . . . that’s a pretty strange thing. Being married I don’t think is that big a change. It did take up a lot of energy and time being single. I think in a way it’s more complicated than being married. I mean, marriage has its own complexities, but they’re different . . . ahhh . . . and I don’t think timewise they’re much different. And I’ve been going out with this person off and on for a number of years, so it’s not like the day I get married it will be, like, whoa, wait a minute, she uses curlers to curl her hair, my God!”

Gates and his bride are constructing a thirty-five-million-dollar house on the eastern slope of Lake Washington, just outside Seattle—a series of five pavilions connected by underground passageways, with display screens scattered throughout the rooms and linked to a central data base containing hundreds of thousands of famous works of art in digital form. Gates does not own the art; he owns the right to reproduce the art digitally, and he and his assistants continue to throw museum officials around the world into confusion by offering to buy the digital rights to works in their collections.

“Do you worry that your wealth is going to corrupt you?”

“Absolutely.” Gates sat upright and raised his arms in the air. “Absolutely. Hey. Being in the spotlight is a corrupting thing. Being successful is a corrupting thing. Having lots of money is a corrupting thing. These are very dangerous things, to be guarded against carefully. And I think that’s very, very hard to do.”

“How do you do it?”

“I’m very close to my family. And that’s important to me. It’s a very centering thing. I live in the same neighborhood I grew up in. One of my sisters lives there. We get together as a family a lot. The woman I’m marrying wants when we have kids to have a normal environment for them. So we’ll mutually brainstorm about how to do the best we can at that.” Gates thought for a while, then said, “I am a person who is very conscious of, like, why don’t I have a TV in my house? I think TV is great. When I’m in a hotel room, I sit there and try all these new channels and see what’s going on. I probably stay up too late watching stuff. TV is neat. I don’t have a TV at home, because I would probably watch it, and I prefer to spend that time thinking—or, mostly, reading. So I’m pretty conscious about not letting myself get used to certain things.”