William Henry Bill Gates III is a co-founder and technology
advisor of Microsoft. He resigned as
the CEO in January 2000 and on February
2014 he also resigned as the chairman and chief
software architect of Microsoft. Gates is currently
the CEO of Cascade Investment LLC through which he owns stake in Corbis Corp
and some Hotels and Resorts. He is one of the most successful
and influential technology magnates in the world. Bill is currently the world’s
richest man with an estimated wealth of $79 billion as at July 2015 (estimated
by Forbes). He has been ranked the number one richest for 16 years out of the
21 years he has been on Forbes list of the world richest. Bill became the
youngest billionaire in the world at age 31. At age 39 he became the world’s
richest man.
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Bill Gates |
Gates resigned from his position as the CEO of Microsoft and handed over to his Harvard roommate, Steve Ballmer. On 4th February 2014, Satya Narayana Nadella also succeeded Ballmer as the CEO. Harvard awarded him honorary doctorate in 2007.
Early Years
Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington, United States. His father, William H.
Gates was a lawyer, and his mother, Mary Gates, a teacher. Young Gates was very
curious, always with a question in mind. In 1967, as a difficult sixth grader, he asks
his mother, "Have you ever tried thinking?"
When Bill was in middle School he
started reading Magazines which developed his interest in starting a company. At
age 13, he enrolled in a private preparatory school, Lakeside High School, where
he first saw a computer. Bill was paying for his time to use this computer
which belonged to Computer Center
Corporation (CCC). Bill would always exploit bugs in the
operating system of the computer in order to gain extra time when he runs out
of money. Unfortunately, he was caught hacking the operating system to
obtain free time and was banned from using the computer.
After the ban, he was hired to find bugs in CCC’s software in exchange for
computer time due to his exceptional skill. At this time Gates went to CCC’s
office to learn source code for the programs that run on their system. Gates
used this opportunity to write his first computer program which allowed users
to play game against the computer. His arrangement with CCC to help find bugs
continued until 1970, when the corporation was no more operating. Later on,
Gates and other three friends were hired by Information Sciences, Inc.
to write a payroll program in Cobol, in exchange for computer time and
royalties.
At lakeside high school, Bill was
attracted to his senior, Paul Allen, because of their common interest in
computer. When Bill was 17 he formed a venture with Paul and named it Traf-O-Data, to develop computer software that
monitors traffic patterns. Because
of Gates’ expertise he was hired to do a “computerized class schedule”
for his high school and was also allowed to teach computer in some classes. Bill graduated from Lakeside in 1973 with a SAT score of 1590 out of 1600 which was a mark of excellence; this helped him
enrolled at Harvard.
Birth of Microsoft
At Harvard, Gates
started dropping some uninteresting classes to pursue his interest. Bill was
once reading “Popular Electronics” magazine when he saw an ad about a new
computer, MITS Altair 8800,
based on the Intel 8080 CPU. He contacted the company, Micro Instrumentation
and Telemetry Systems (MITS), claiming he had written a BASIC interpreter for
their machine (though he hadn’t) and if they were interested in buying. When
the company accepted to buy, Bill quickly contacted Paul Allen and they wrote a
programming language called the BASIC for the company (a very demanding task
for them). This earned them $3,000 and a copyright for the interpreter. Paul
was hired into MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bill
then dropped-out of Harvard to work with Allen at MITS and they called their
partnership Micro-Soft (in 1975). In 1976 they changed the name to Microsoft
and registered it as a trade name.
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First employees of Microsoft |
On January 1, 1979 they moved Microsoft from
Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington.
In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to
write a BASIC interpreter for its new computer. Bill first referred them to
Digital Research, developers of CP/M operating system, but Digital Research
couldn’t proof their ability. Bill later bought an operating system, DOS, from
a software developer (together with the copyright) in Seattle and sold it to
IBM for $50,000. Bill was smart not to transfer the copyright of DOS to IBM.
Microsoft started selling DOS as MS-DOS to some hardware producers. These sales
promoted Microsoft in the industry.
In 1981, Steve Jobs also approached Microsoft
to develop a visual operating system (a system that uses
mouse to drive a graphic interface and displays texts and images on the screen)
for Macintosh Computers. The contract between the two wasn’t successful. Microsoft
later launched WINDOWS which had a graphic interface. Steve Jobs claimed that
Bill had stolen his idea but Bill refuted, claiming he had already seen the
idea at Xerox.
In 1982, Paul Allen was diagnosed of
Stage 1-A Hodgkin's lymphoma and could not take active part in Microsoft whiles
on treatment. He fully left Microsoft in 1983 without selling his ownership in
Microsoft. Microsoft released the first Windows, Windows 1.0, on 20 November,
1985 and floated their first shares in 1986. In 1987, Gates just 31 years
became a billionaire. In 1995, Gates was ranked the richest man in the world
with an estimated wealth of US$12.9 billion.
Personal Life
In 1992, Bill
(32years) got married to Melinda French (28 years) who was a worker at
Microsoft. They have three children; Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe. Gates currently
owns a 66,000 square-foot compound built into a hillside on the edge of lake
Washington which he nicknamed Xanadu 2.0. He also owns a private jet.
