And don’t lie to us, because surely you have spent dozens and dozens of hours enjoying both solitaire and minesweeper on your old Windows operating system, and you may even set different records beating all your friends.
Minesweeper was originally born to teach users how to handle a mouse on their new computerbut the popularity of the game was so great that it received a multitude of versions thinking of having fun.
Well, it turns out Bill Gates he was totally enamored with minesweeper, enough to cause him an addiction, distracting him from his much more important duties at Microsoft.
And Melinda French, who would later become Melinda Gates, asked all the office workers not to talk about the minesweeper at all so as not to influence the work of Bill Gates.
The story, told by Ars Technicawho recently shared an excerpt from the book Minesweeper of Kyle Orlandtalk about this curiosity that has gone down in history.
A revolutionary minesweeper for Microsoft
Before minesweeper was available on operating systems Windows for users, it was tested internally at Microsoft offices, by all workers, including himself Bill Gates.
In fact, minesweeper was so popular in the office that leaderboards were created within the company and Bill Gates was at the top.
“Bill got addicted. Originally, I think I got an email from Bill that said, ‘I just solved Minesweeper Beginner in 10 seconds. Alright?’”, he shared Charles Fitzgeraldwho was product manager of the Windows Entertainment.
Bill Gates played minesweeper so much that the game was taken from his own computer, but the CEO didn’t hesitate to walk into other people’s offices, access their computers, and play a few games of minesweeper, and so on every day.
However Bill Gates, playing in the offices of other workers, was able to set a new record, and asked Fitzgerald to verify it: “This was early in the evening. So we went there, at seven at night. [Hallman] he was a former Boeing executive, and he wasn’t a funny guy, so… the idea that Bill is sitting there after work, going to the president’s office so he can play Minesweeper.”.
Coming to this untenable situation with the leaderboards, Fitzgerald decided to use a computer program to set an unbeatable record in minesweeper, hoping that Bill Gates would stop playing.
After that Bill Gates took it as a joke: “My critical abilities are being displaced by a computer. This technology is going too far. Machines can do things faster than people, how can we keep our human dignity?”.