About

Bill Gates "It's Amazing to Think What Great and Exciting things People Will Be Doing with PCs in 30 Years" is a reaction image macro series based on a photo of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The quote, while attributed to Gates, could not be confirmed. With the meme, which first went viral on Reddit in July 2019, people joke about how most people use this incredible computing power to make absurd memes.

Origin

During the 1980s, Doug Wilson photographed Bill Gates and the early days of Microsoft. While the photograph used in the meme does not have a date attributed, other pictures from the session feature the date October 1st, 1984 (shown below, left and right).^[1][2]

On July 23rd, 2020, in the /r/dankmemes ^[3] subreddit, Redditor pussypoppers posted the earliest known version of the meme, placing the quote underneath the photograph and claiming that Gates said this in 1989. Underneath the photograph, in an image labled "2019," the image appears in the application Photoshop. The post received more than 30,000 points (98% upvoted) and 140 comments in less than two years (shown below).

Spread

That day, others shared variations of the meme on Reddit (example below, left).

On November 27th, 2019, Tesla-founder Elon Musk posted a variation on Twitter.^[4] The post received more than 276,000 likes and 30,000 retweets in less than one year (shown below, center).

Over the next few months, others continued to share the meme. On January 16th, 2020, Redditor RustyDoritoMilk published a variation in the /r/dankmemes^[5] subreddit, placing the quote and photograph above a screenshot of the video game Minecraft. The post received more than 23,000 points (98% upvoted) and 80 comments in less than one year (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References