-Bill Gates, University of Illinois at Champagne Urbana, 2004.

People don’t give Bill Gates too much credit. Today, everyone points to Steve Jobs and the heads at Apple as the true innovators in computing technology. The more tech-forward point to Linus Torvalds as the great visionary (and don’t get me wrong: these people may be right). But Bill Gates got a lot right, especially early on in the game.

This quote is his career, the career of many others, and the era surrounding my childhood in brief summary.