Over his years at Microsoft, Bill Gates gave dozens upon dozens of speeches and in many of them he would offer his vision of the future. In recent years, his prognostications have stretched beyond IT to encompass the eradication of disease and inroads to remove people from poverty.

He has been lately speaking a lot about how we will interact more with digital devices, with voice recognition and other technologies that will lead to pervasive computing and information always being available to us. Some of what he has said has been off, but much of his gazing into the future has been very close to what has transpired or spot on. Pulled from Microsoft's archives of his speeches, as well as IDG News Service archives and other resources available over the Internet, here are just some of the predictions he has made over the years:

-- "Certainly the Internet is going to have a huge range of devices connected to it. Telephones will be directly or indirectly connected to the Internet. There's two very important form factors that I think will be popular and yet require you to subset the PC. One of those is the handheld device where, because of the screen size, because of the cost requirements, because of the battery life, you want to scale down both the operating systems and the applications. And I think there's great progress being made there. We just introduced, on Sunday, our hand-held PC approach using Windows CE, and there's many vendors building those subset machines." Comdex, Nov. 19, 1996, Las Vegas.

-- "There are a lot of challenges with the Internet. You know, people can view this as a glass half full. And there's been so many wonderful things written about the Internet, there's no doubt we'll see articles that are kind of a backlash saying, well, is it really all that people said it would be? Well, in the next two or three years, there will still be shortcomings, but I think to really understand this thing, you have to think out 10 or 20 years when a broad set of people will see using the Internet to get information as part of their daily activity, and they'll expect everything they do, whether it's scheduling a doctor's appointment or negotiating a contract, or trying to decide on a purchase decision, they'll use the Internet as a tool for that." Comdex, 1996.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.