Is Bill Gates finally figuring out that when you’ve got $51 billion in your brokerage account it’s possible to slow down a bit, enjoy life and watch your kid grow up?
Last week Binary Bill downshifted his duties at headquarters in Redmond, Wash., by making his take-no-prisoners sidekick, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s new president and announcing personal plans to step back from the hurly-burly of hiring and firing and merging and monopolizing.
The erstwhile Raptor of Redmond, who has been highly visible as doting papa with wife, baby and nanny in tow at several recent high-powered meetings with media industry VIPs, says he now plans to focus on the future while Ballmer will see to the day-to-day cracking of heads.
OUT OF THE ATTIC…
…AND ONTO CD-ROM
If there is a special mansion in heaven set aside for computer nerds, there is a corner in the celestial attic waiting for a new product under development by CD-ROM software publisher Mindscape Inc. for late-summer sales:
The Complete National Geographic: 109 years of the magazine on 31 CDs or 4 digital video discs. We’re talking 190,000 pages of content here–every naked tribal dancer, every moon shot, every camel ride ever covered by the venerable Geographic since Vol. 1, No. 1.
FRETTING ILLINI
WORLD WIDE WORRYWARTS
If you think playing with a computer on the Internet is merely fun and games, check out the title of this hot cybersession set for Aug. 5 at the Amoco Building:
“The Growing Menace: High-Tech Crime, Cyber Terror and Information Warfare at the Dawn of the New Millennium,” sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago.
If you’re looking for something new to worry about, get details and register at www.acsp.uic.edu/oicj.
SEED DEE?
MAKE THAT CD
In addition to De Kalb’s better known products of seed corn and baseball caps for farmers, the northern Ilinois town is also home to the hugely popular backpack line of CD-ROM players from Micro Solutions Inc. The company all but owns the market for CD-ROM players that plug in by way of a desktop or laptop’s printer (parallel) port.
This month is the debut of a new wrinkle, a parallel port backpack CD-rewriter that allows a user to either back up 640 megabytes of data or record 74 minutes of digital music with included software.
If you carefully follow the recording instructions and lay down all the audio in a single session (a wizard leads you through the process), you can play your CD-R discs in regular music CD players. That means that with a $500 investment garage bands all over America can start cutting demo discs and pepper every record company in the world with their sound.
