Getting on the PC Bus

     In my first year in Long Island, an announcement of a press conference in the city about a new PC interface –the Universal Serial Bus (USB) – grabbed my attention. Always hungry to be in the froth of Manhattan, I jumped at the chance to go.

Despite the long drive on bad freeways – some potholes were nearly as big as my car – and the difficulty finding parking even at ridiculous prices, I was elated. I felt like I was travelling into the center of the universe. The event drew me closer to the inner circle of the rising partnership of Microsoft and Intel that the press dubbed Wintel.

All I recall of that press conference today is meeting Carl Stork, Microsoft’s liaison to the hardware world. I imagined Carl was Bill Gates’ older brother. They both had mops of over-the-collar blonde hair, oversized glasses and thin, high-pitched voices. Unlike Bill, no strand of Carl’s hair was ever out of place, and his voice was measured, absent Bill’s adolescent squeak. In a meeting or interview, Carl sat still, focused; Bill was known for rocking, distracted like an idiot savant.

Carl Stork (left) with one of his top tech evangelists, Dave Williams

I approached Carl after the USB event with my usual list of reporter’s questions. He sized me up quickly. For him, I was a link to the 40,000 or so readers of EE Times, folks he wanted to attend his expanding annual event -- the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, aka WinHEC.

I dutifully brought back one of Carl’s business cards, and handed it to Girish or Weitzner, requesting they make OEM a media sponsor of WinHEC.  Two weeks later, my publishers had not only paid the fee, they negotiated a deal for me to take a seat at WinHEC planning meetings and (bonus!) get an interview with Gates, the equivalent in the PC industry of an audience with the Pope.

WinHEC was one of the Meccas of the PC industry. Every company that made PCs or anything that went inside them or plugged into them sent someone. It was Microsoft’s stage for rolling out news about the next version of Windows and what new hardware features the operating system would or would not enable. Gates typically keynoted the event, but Microsoft shared the stage with the chosen few who had ideas about how to improve the PC in ways that aligned with its Windows road map.

I felt both like an insider and an outsider attending the WinHEC planning meetings on Microsoft’s tech chic campus in Redmond. I was among the few newbies in the group, and as the only non-engineer, some of the conversations were over my head.

I was also the only reporter in the room, so my perch was even more precarious: I was alert for news but had to respect to some degree the privacy of the conversations. I can still hear rain pelting the conference room windows, while I munched my oatmeal cookie and sipped my latte, all ears but trying to keep a poker face. In those days, finding out what was on the Windows road map felt like my raison d’etre.

Stork set the agenda, flanked by his team of so-called technology evangelists. These young marketing wannabes -- usually clad in matching red polo shirts, branded with the corporate logo -- were charged with rallying support for some feature Microsoft wanted to see in future PCs. They were a diverse lot of men and women, most with technical backgrounds, each well versed in their narrow field.

Eight or ten others in the meetings came from systems makers (my readers) or chip companies (my advertisers). All were deferential to Stork and his team, but not afraid to ask probing questions to explore the contours of what Microsoft’s engineers were thinking or ought to know.

The Microsoft team wasn’t always clear on what was or wasn’t practical to expect from the next generation of chips. So, Stork sought technical advice and was willing to change direction when needed.

I only attended a handful of planning meetings before EE Times dropped its sponsorship, but I became a regular at WinHEC, hunting for scoops. Often the news was thin, no new hardware, just new extensions of Windows.

One of Stork’s biggest bugaboos was the poor quality of drivers, the software companies developed to let their devices talk to Windows. Often junior programmers or hardware engineers with rudimentary knowledge of Windows wrote this code. As a result, drivers often had bugs and sometimes didn’t work at all. So, Stork created multi-day tutorials at WinHEC devoted to writing better drivers. It was part of the practical work needed to drive the platform forward, but for me it was sheer boredom, certainly not fodder for an EE Times story.

My interview with Bill Gates in April 1996 was the highlight of my time at WinHEC, but it was underwhelming.

Ushered into a small, windowless room well off the main drag at the Seattle convention center, I was nervous, stiff and over prepared. Stork sat in to make sure everything ran smoothly. Gates seemed anxious to get the 30-minute affair over as soon as possible.

My goal was to break some real news, but, like most executives, Gates was trained to speak in bland generalities. I hammered away at one hot topic after another. He rocked in his chair like a featherweight boxer on the spectrum, bobbing and weaving as we surveyed the still-nascent landscape of convergence.

He had just given a keynote on what Microsoft called the entertainment PC, its volley to counter consumer electronics giants like Sony who were developing their own operating systems to deliver what folks were calling the “living room PC.”

OEM Magazine interview with Gates, May 1996

“The thing that distinguishes our OS is the apps,” Gates said, claiming the interactive encyclopedia was one of the most popular Windows apps. We were years away from broadband networks that would support Wikipedia on the Internet.

In some ways, we were digital dreamers, living in a communications desert. “We’ll be stuck with POTS [plain old telephone service] or narrowband for some time,” he said. Microsoft was pushing for the nerdy and expensive ISDN links that never took off and the “mid-band” 28.8 and 40 kilobit-per-second dialup connections that were on the near horizon, but he admitted good communications links would “not be a standard part of the experience for most PC users for the next five years,” or about 2000, which turned out to be about right.

Finally, I focused on a Microsoft initiative to deliver a slimmed down version of Windows for handheld devices, one of his pet projects. I managed to eke out of him a minor detail about the rough timing of the code’s initial release. I had my news story, however miniscule, and Gates had met his commitment in exchange for however much Girish and Weitzner agreed to pay to be media sponsors. We each fled the scene with relief, never to meet again.

Despite our awkward assignation, I remain a fan. Gates is smart, and can be charismatic in his nerdy fashion. Even though he lacked a technical degree, he grasped and articulated trends in ways folks could understand. He was a huge believer in mobile computing and what he called a future of “information at your fingertips.”

Ironically, despite many initiatives, Microsoft never got traction in mobile computing beyond laptops. Its MP3 players and smartphones failed; and its tablets are at best fast followers of Apple’s iPad that defined the category.

Gates learned that when you have a relatively open platform like the PC, driving it forward is like herding cats. His friend and archrival, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, didn’t have that problem, a dynamic they joked about years later in a wonderful dialog hosted by the Wall Street Journal.

Next: They Called Him Mr. USB