30 years ago everything was real, more authentic. Now with artificial intelligence, you can no longer trust videos or photos from the past. Everything can be manipulated. This mythical photo of Bill Gates hanging like a monkey in a forest is authentic. The founder of Microsoft holds a CD-ROM on a stack of papers 10 meters high.
The photo is a visual representation of the message you want to convey: A CD-ROM holds 300,000 sheets of paper full of text.. And since that amount is difficult to visualize mentally, Bill Gates does it visually: hanging over 300,000 sheets of paper stacked in two towers about 10 meters high, with a CD in his hand.
The powerful image has a curious story behind it, since It was not Gates’ or Microsoft’s idea.. Let’s get to know her.
The story of the legendary photo of Bill Gates with a CD
You may not know it, but the vast majority of CEOs, upon entering their position, they sign a dangerousness clause: They are prohibited from carrying out practices that endanger their lives, such as bungee jumping, traveling by plane, or climbing a mountain. That is why you will not see the CEOs of Microsoft, OpenAI or Google practicing extreme sports.
In this historic photo, Bill Gates is hanging quite high, but as you can see, he has several restraints, and there is no danger.
To have a little context, the photo was taken in 1994a year of transition in the field of domestic physical formats. Most people still stored their data on hard drives of just 10 MB, or on floppy disks with a capacity of 1.44 MB.
In the early 90s the CD-ROM was releasedan album inspired by musical CDs, which contained impressive (for the time) 700MB data.
We are talking about a small disk the size of a coaster, with 70 times more capacity than an average hard drive, and 500 times more than a floppy disk.
That was an immense amount of data, and that is what the photo of Bill Gates wants to show: That a small CD-ROM disk fits 300,000 pages, two stacks of paper more than 10 meters high.:
As I mentioned in the introduction, It was not a Microsoft idea. At that time, National Geographic I was filming a documentary called “The Information Revolution”, which showed the great change that digital storage represented compared to paper.
They wanted to show just that, how much information fits on a CD-ROMso they came up with the idea of the paper mountain. To make it more impressive, and in the process get a good cover for the magazine, they invited Bill Gates to climb on top of the tower.
The documentary also wanted to reflect the environmental benefits of not using paper, which is why the mountain of paper is in the middle of a forest.
In 1994, Microsoft was months away from releasing Windows 95, which would be released on CD-ROM, and was interested in supporting the format. So Bill Gates agreed immediately. The rest, as they say, is computer history.