The Road Ahead

This book was written 25 years ago, in 1995, right on the cusp of the Internet as we know it today. Bill Gates was the CEO of Microsoft at the time, and this book was really meant to be an look at the exciting things that we coming in the future. It’s chapter after chapter about how the “information highway” is going to change our lives.

The “Information highway” or “information superhighway” is what we know now as the Internet. Back then, this phrase was thrown around a lot to help people conceptualize what it was. I still remember the promise of “500 TV channels on the information superhighway,” which just blew us away at the time.

What amazing about this book is how right Gates got everything. Seriously – he accurately predicted almost everything that happened in the next 25 years. Back in 1995, he was living in 2020. He knew exactly how things were going to play out.

More and more, I think Bill Gates is one of the smartest people who ever lived.

This was a fun read. It was kind of a time capsule, and gave me a window back to how things were before the Internet achieved utility-like status in our daily lives, and what things we were dreaming about back then.