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I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

One of the biggest challenges we had in the first decade was not that many people had personal computers. There weren't that many people to sell to, and it was hard to identify them.

Managerial and professional people hadn't really used computers, hadn't sat down at keyboards, until personal computers. Personal computers have a totally different feel.

Well, the thought that everybody might have a personal computer at their desk or their home was certainly not on the mainstream of anybody's activity at that time.

Computers have become more friendly, understandable, and lots of years and thought have been put into developing software to convince people that they want and need a computer.

At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.

Originally, I was in both software and in online computing. The first innovation really was sort of at that time that we're marrying the telephone and the computer so that people wouldn't have to drive to the computer center. We didn't have $1,000 computers.

People thought I was very pro-computer. I was on the cover of 'Wired' magazine. Then things began to change. In the early '80s, we met this technology and became smitten like young lovers. But today our attachment is unhealthy.

Computers sort of came around through games and toys. And you know, the first computer most people had in the house may have been a computer to play 'Pong,' a little microprocessor embedded, and then other games that came after that.

My biggest mistake was when I started up easyEverything, a chain of Internet cafes. The idea that people would go to a shop to use a computer was revolutionary in 1999. It worked for a while, but cheap technology almost killed it. One silver lining of the problems I faced was that it gave me experience of turnarounds.