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.