Most of the people who had PCs did not have modems and could not use those PCs as communicating devices. They really were using them for spreadsheets or word processing or storing recipes or playing games or what have you.

I like ... what I characterize as more built-to-last ideas rather than built-to-flip ideas.

If you can build a company and make money, great. But eventually, my intention is to give all my money away. I told my kids that. [Wealth] is not particularly helpful to kids. It's almost a burden. It's better to allow them to do their own thing and have their own successes.

My father and his brothers were all lawyers, so I think that the expectation was probably for me to grow up to be an attorney, but it never really fascinated me that much. I was more interested in building things.

The idea that maybe you don't have to own a car if you only need one occasionally may catch on, just like time-sharing caught on in real estate

We lose money on signing up the customers where there's some marketing costs associated with giving them a free month. It doesn't much matter whether you make a little bit or lose a little bit.. as you well know, because you lose a ton on every copy of The Washington Post (newspaper).

And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal.