How can one retain human dignity when computers do the important stuff better than people?" When Gates found out how Reeves had cheated to achieve a three-second score, he fired off an e-mail message: "My critical skills are being displaced by a computer. To beat Gates's time, Tom Reeves, a development manager for Microsoft, wrote a small computer program (a macro) that attacked the puzzle automatically. (Ordinary mortals have been known to take five minutes to solve this puzzle.) That's where he set his personal record of five seconds. Instead, he went to the machine of Mike Hallman, then-president of Microsoft, when he felt compelled to play. Microsoft founder Bill Gates became so addicted to Minesweeper that he took it off his personal office machine, reports Libby Duzan, lead product manager for entertainment at the company. Large gray men in large gray suits - lugging laptops loaded with spreadsheets - are consumed by beating their Solitaire scores, flight attendants observe. "The water treatment plant in Warrenton, I installed their system, and the next time I saw the client, the first thing he said to me was, 'I've got 2,000 points in Solitaire.' "Īs a result, airplanes full of businessmen resemble not board meetings but video arcades. "Gomer" Pyles, president of Able Bodied Computers in The Plains, Va. "It's swallowed entire companies," says Dennis J. Now it's the other way around, so the boss can't see you playing Solitaire." "You used to see offices laid out with the back of the video monitor toward the wall. "Yup, sure," says Frank Burns, a principal in the area's largest regional computer bulletin board, the MetaNet. Pre-loaded inside Microsoft's Windows software that controls 80 percent of the world's new PCs are two insidious games - Solitaire and Minesweeper.ĭoes this mean that productivity software spreading through the nation's offices is instead sowing indolence, distraction and the collapse of American capitalism? As industry and government drop clunky old mainframes for networked personal computers, America is discovering the truly diabolical nature of Bill Gates's Microsoft empire. Luckily the customer, too, was a Minesweeper addict. "Holy !" shouted the president of Washington's Corporate & Government Consulting Inc. Dit Talley was on the phone with a customer the moment he cracked the Minesweeper computer game in a world-class eight seconds.
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