The road ahed

Bill Gates. The Road Ahead
Chapter 1. The First Part of the Road.
I wrote my first program for a computer when I was thirteen years old. A program tells a computer to do something. My program told the computer to play a game. This computer was very big and very slow. It didn't even have a computer screen. But I thought it was wonderful. I was just a kid, but the computer did everything I told it to do. And even today, that's what I love about computers. When I write a good program, it always works perfectly, every time.
The computer was our toy. We grew up with it.
And when we grew up, we brought our toy with us. Now the computer is in our homes and in our offices [' fisiz]. It has changed our lives
[laivz] and it is changing them again, because now the computers are coming together to make a new system. In this system, computers all over the world are beginning to work together. Our computers will be our telephones, our post office, our library, and our banks.

kid

(ам.)

- ребенок;

library ['laibr ri] библиотека;

When we talk about this new system, we call it the Internet. This book will try to answer questions about the future of the Internet – what it will be like, and how we will use it.
Sometimes when we talk about the future of the
Internet, we call it the "Information Highway".
***
The Information Highway, when it comes, is going to bring new ways of doing things. New ways are strange, and sometimes people worry about them, but they are also exciting. I'm very happy that I will be a part of this strange new time. worry ['w ri] беспокоиться;

I've felt this happiness and excitement before.
After I wrote that first program at the age of thirteen, my friend Paul [p :l] Allen and I spent a lot of time using computers. Back then computers were very expensive. It cost forty dollars an hour to use one. We made some of our money during the summers, when we worked for computer companies.

excitement -