The tables were turned on Bill Gates -- if only for a moment.

After a speech yesterday at Carnegie Mellon University in which the software guru and world's richest man detailed the trajectory of technology, a student offered him a gift -- a Linux software disk.

John Beale, Post-Gazette Microsoft's Bill Gates talks to students and guests yesterday at Carnegie Mellon University. Click photo for larger image. Related article Computer Q&A: Gracefully, Gates dances around downloading

While laughs rose from the audience, Gates didn't flinch, agreed to accept it and quipped: "How much is it worth?"

On his first CMU visit, the Microsoft Corp. chairman toured the campus, participating in a round table with professors and promoting software development as a career. It was the second stop in a five-campus tour, including Cornell, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, where he was enrolled before launching Microsoft in 1975.

Clad in navy trousers and light blue V-neck sweater and wearing his famous round glasses, Gates promoted "seamless computing" in which a world of music, photographs, data, news and documents would be available on personal computers, from desk tops to small hand-held devices. He forecast that within a decade, a computer will be able to store and organize a person's entire life history -- documents, photos, favorite movies, books and music.

"There's a divide between the world of paper and the world of the screen that needs to be changed," Gates told the packed crowd of several hundred, periodically demonstrating the latest gizmos such as a computerized wristwatch.

Gates mused on a variety of topics, from the history of computing to his philanthropic work in education and world health to outsourcing. "Any job can be done wherever you find the best-qualified people," he said. "This will present a challenge for the United States to maintain its competitive edge."

Recalling the 1980s when Americans were concerned about competition from Japan, Gates said the consequent "humility" that gripped the country spurred it to further excellence. He expects the same to happen now.

He poked fun at himself while displaying some of the spam e-mail he's received, drawing chuckles from the crowd. One promised to help with legal problems. Another offered to reduce his high personal debt. A third said he needs a college degree (Gates never graduated from Harvard).

Gates, in a more serious tone, said cybersecurity might be his industry's most pressing issue. "We have to have a level of reliability security and isolation that we don't have today."

Microsoft's chief software architect regaled the company's productive relationship with CMU, regularly hiring from interns to top executives as well as giving money to the university.

Noting CMU's leadership in the realm of voice recognition research, Gates said that in five years the technology would be ready for more commercial use. "CMU's been pushing the state of the art for a long time."

Despite its close relationship with the university, the Redmond, Wash.-based software firm has no plans to expand its research and development operations to Pittsburgh beyond its offices on the North Shore, Gates said.

And Linux? Is he worried?

Open Source proponents such as Linux don't believe in a software industry or software jobs, he said, whereas Microsoft believes in both free and commercial software. "Linux is, in some forms, a competitor of Microsoft's," said Gates. "We take it very seriously."