Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sun Microsystems brought a Russian engineer and his wife to the United States for a visit. During the trip, the wife took a brief detour to visit an American supermarket. After stepping inside the bright, well-stocked store, she burst into tears. "All those years in the Soviet Union and she had no idea there was that much food out there," Sun CEO Scott McNealy recalled. "She realized in that one instant, how much she'd been missing in her life."

Considering my struggle in getting my home PC to heel--an ordeal that has sometimes brought me to the edge of tears--I can relate. Throughout this summer of my PC discontent, I've been thinking about how much the computing world was molded by chance. Yet by the time Gates started building his empire, the general shape of what would become desktop computing had already formed. Want perspective? Take a trip back to 1960 when J.C.R. Licklider published his seminal paper, "Man-Computer Symbiosis." This was a world where punch card computing was considered state of the art. But Licklider knew it was the start of something bigger.