This manga, published in 1982 as “My Computer God – The Story of Bill Gates” (マイコンの神さま ビル・ゲイツ物語), in KoroKoro Comic, is a fascinating piece of history, and quite amusing to boot. As a piece of history, it harkens back to a time when Bill Gates was the Larry Page or Sergey Brin of his day, a dynamic entrepreneur in charge of an up and coming venture company, a far cry from the monolithic titan of corporate America Microsoft would later become. The entire story is translated below.
I left the format in right to left reading, and the original Japanese scans are available below.
As a historical aside, the manga does not use the term “PC” (or pasokon), instead opting for “My Computer”, or maikon.
Great credit goes to the original source for digging a thirty year old magazine out from some forgotten archive and taking the trouble to scan it.
Bill Gates still is evil. Even if he has made PCs easy to use lol.
Now THIS definitely proves that the Japanese can make manga out of ANYTHING.
That big-toothed kid is Arashi from the anime Game Center Arashi from 1982.
There’s another manga in the same vein, about George Soros. Was translated in English, saw it at some Borders in Malaysia. Didn’t have the time to stay though, had to leave and was outta cash, so… I didn’t read all the way to the end :(
The really famous one is of course the Ghosn Nissan manga; business manga aren’t exactly common, but nor are they unheard of.
You should e-mail that to Microsoft in Seattle.
Maybe it will come to their attention naturally. It is certainly very positive to MS, which makes a change I suppose.
haha, that’s awesome, although its still not as weird as a manga about extreme bread battles.
theres another one similar to this one out in canada called edu-manga it stars Edward Einstein, and is about science I’m guessing.
watch “pirates of silicon valley” for more clear view… but this comic is funny and good enough.
Very fun read, thanks for posting
What about Apple?
i looked it up and came across this:
“After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school’s computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students.”
this is so boring. Who’d want to read about BILL GATES?? Give me One Piece anyday over this ****.
Because without Bill Gates you wouldn’t be posting on this site today. In all probability if Gates hadn’t started the whole home computer thing there wouldn’t be PC’s today. Fact: Sinclair, Apple, Apricot, Commodore and others started up home computing AFTER Bill Gates started the ball rolling. So in all fairness give the guy his credit and his due.
Oh, and before anybody says otherwise, I hate MS and I can’t stand Bill Gates, especially after finding out that one form of his name in ASCII with the letters added together come to 666.
Antichrist, anybody?
Antichrist? Uh, maybe he will make Skynet and bring the rise of machines after some strange bizarre incident regarding a blu-ray disk. A battle against Sony and will lead to Skynet destroying Sony and the world! Nah… that may never happen.