Bill Gates (1955-Present)
Bill Gates is co-founder, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the most successful software company in the world, celebrated for creating software that is strong and innovative while still being user friendly. Microsoft now employs more than 85,000 people in 85 countries.
Bill Gates came from a household of entrepreneurship and exuberant liveliness. William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28th, 1955. His father, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. His late mother, Mary Gates, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington trustee, and chairperson of United Way International.
He attended public elementary school and the private Lakeside School. There, he fell upon his interest in software and started programming computers at the age of thirteen. In late 1968 the Lakeside programming group was organized consisting of him, Paul and two other students from Lakeside Prep School. They sought to apply their new computer skills to the material world. They received this opportunity when the Computer Centre Corporation made a deal with them. In exchange for limitless computer time, Gates and his friends explored the computer for bugs and weaknesses in the system.
The Computer Centre Corporation went under in March 1970. The Lakeside programmers immediately needed a new source of computer time. Their next opportunity came from Information Sciences Inc. who engaged them to produce a payroll program. As compensation for this they would be granted free computer time and royalties from the software system, granting them a source of income for the first time. Traf-O-Data was his and Allen's following project, which involved making software to assist in measuring traffic flow. They earned riches of approximately $20,000 from the company in whole, which lasted until he departed for college.
In 1973, He enrolled in Harvard University as a freshman, where he lived just down the hall from Steve Ballmer, today Microsoft's CEO. While at Harvard, Gates wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS Altair. In 1975, Gates and Allen co-founded Microsoft Corporation to market their variation of BASIC, known as Microsoft BASIC. It was the principal interpreted computer language of the MS-DOS operating system, and was central to Microsoft's early commercial success. Microsoft BASIC evolved into Microsoft QuickBasic and QBasic, Visual Basic, and later on still, Visual Basic .NET. In his junior year, he left Harvard to dedicate his energies to Microsoft. Directed by a notion that the computer would be a precious tool on every office desktop and in every home, they started producing software for personal computers. His foresight and his vision for personal computing have been the core of the success of Microsoft and the software industry.
In February 1976, Gates published the "Open Letter to Hobbyists", which stunned the computer hobbyist community by maintaining that a commercial market existed for computer software. Gates expressed in the letter that software should not be copied without the publisher's permission, which he likened to piracy. Though legally correct, Gates's proposition was unprecedented in a community that was shaped from its ham radio legacy and hacker ethic, in which inventions and knowledge were freely shared in the community. Even so, Gates was correct about the market prospects and his endeavors paid off: Microsoft Corporation became one of the world's most prosperous business enterprises, and a significant player in the introduction of a retail software industry.
In the process, Gates acquired a debatably distasteful reputation for his business practices. A prime example bears on the roots of MS-DOS. In the late 1970s, IBM was preparing to get into the personal computer market with its IBM Personal Computer (PC), which was released in 1981. IBM required an operating system for its new computer, which was supported on the recently evolved, 16-bit architecture of the Intel x86 processor family.
After briefly negotiating with a different company (the Digital Research Corporation in California), IBM approached Microsoft. Without disclosing their affiliations with IBM, Microsoft executives in turn approached Seattle Computer, which had produced a x86-based operating system, and purchased the operating system for a rumored sum of $50,000. (In Microsoft's defense, they might have been under agreement not to discuss their talks with IBM, so they really could not have disclosed their ties.) Microsoft subsequently licensed the operating system to IBM (which released it under the PC-DOS name) and worked with computer manufacturers to include its own version, called MS-DOS, with every computer system distributed.
Stunningly successful, this trade was disputed in court by Seattle Computer on the grounds that Microsoft had hidden its relationship with IBM in order to buy the operating system cheaply; later, there was a settlement, but no admission of fraudulence or guilt. Gates' reputation was further clouded by a series of major antitrust suits brought both by the U.S. Justice Department and individual companies against Microsoft in the late 1990s.
Microsoft announced Windows 1.0 in 1983, which promised a graphical user interface (GUI), better graphics, and multi-tasking. However, the final product wasn't released for another 2 years until 1985 and, with very few compatible applications, early versions of Windows didn't sell well. Over the next five years Microsoft released several upgraded windows 2.0 versions, which contributed many programs, versatility and features.
As Microsoft matured, its share price skyrocketed, and at the age of thirty-one Bill Gates became the youngest self-made billionaire in American history. While it is indisputable that Gates has played hardball in the software industry one can't argue that his development of software and programs has been his contribution to the revolution of computers and computer science.
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