Bill Gates Biography

Bill Gates whose full name is William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955. He is an American software developer, investor, author, Businessman, and philanthropist. Along with his childhood friend Paul Allen, Bill Gates was successfully able to co-found the world’s largest personal computer software company, Microsoft Corporation. Bill gates is a very capable person and a man with many talents and during his career at Microsoft was able to hold the position of chairman, Chief executive officer, president, chief software architect, and also was the largest individual shareholder of the company until May 2014. He was succeeded by Satya Nadella on 4th February 2014 who took on the role as the CEO of Microsoft. Between the years 1970s and 1980s, Bill Gates was considered to be the best non-entrepreneur of the microcomputer revolution. Today Bill Gates is considered to be the third richest person in the world only behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. 

Bill Gates  Early Life

• Bill Gates’s full name is Will Henry Gate III and he was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. His father’s name was William Gates Sr who was a senior lawyer and his mother was Mary Maxwell who worked as an executive at a major bank. He belonged to a middle-class family with his older sister Kristianne and a younger sister whose name is Libby.

• The atmosphere and the treatment in the Gate’s family were warm and full of heart and as the era of 1950s to 1960s was of the great depression where everyone was struggling financially many parents would have neglected the needs of their children, but Gates family were kind enough and they encouraged their children to work hard and pursue their dreams no matter what. When a child grows in an environment where he is reminded every time that he means something and he would accomplish something in this world, great things are bound to happen and so it did happen with Bill Gates. 

• Bill Gate has been described by many people as very competitive yet humbling in nature, Earlier in his life, he had shown signs of competitiveness when he took on the responsibility to coordinate the family athlete games at the Gate families summer house on Puget Sound. He was also very interested in playing board games and always enjoyed taking risks. Bill Gates was very closely related to his mother, Mary who initially was a teacher but later on devoted her time to raising the children and also working on civic affairs and charitable works. Mary would often carry along Bill Gates with him to any charitable event or to the events where she had volunteered to help people. This small act might have helped Gates to realize the importance of giving back to the community as by the year 2016 he was on the list of the biggest Philanthropists in the world. 

• Gates attended the prestigious Lakeside School when he was 13 years old. Gates learned about computers for the first time here. He taught himself how to program in Basic by creating a basic game of tic-tac-toe. Gates loved working with computers and made arrangements with Computer Center Corporation (CCC) to spend time on their computers learning source code like Fortran, Machine Code, and Lisp.

Bill Gates Education

• As a youngster, Gates was an avid reader who spent many hours reading over reference books such as encyclopedias. Gates' parents began to be concerned about his conduct at the age of 11 or 12. His grades were good, but he appeared bored and distant at times, and his parents were concerned that he might become a loner. Despite their great belief in public education, Gates' parents enrolled him in Seattle's premium preparatory Lakeside School when he was 13 years old. He excelled in virtually all of his courses, particularly math and physics, but also drama and English.

• At the age of 13, Bill Gates got enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school where he was able to successfully write his first software program. When Bill Gates was in his 8th grade when he took interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was very spontaneous and had a keen interest in computer science, he was excused by the teachers to pursue his dream and code as much as he liked. Bill Gates wrote his first computer program on this machine which was an implementation of the tic tac toe game that allowed the users to play games against the computer. As the times passed events happened and then Gate did not waste his time and went to the CCS’s offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system which included Fortran, machine language and Lisp. 

• In the year 1973, Bill Gates graduated from the Lakeside school with a perfect SAT score which was considered to be an intellectual feat that would be mentioned in years to come. Gates’s parents wanted him to pursue Law so Bill Gates college started after he got enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 1973. While he was in Law school he realized that he wasn’t meant to pursue Law as his career and within two years which is in 1975 he dropped out of college to pursue his business with his long-time childhood friend Allen. 

Bill Gates: History and College Life

• Bill Gates met Paul Allen who was a senior in Lakeside high school. The two became best mates and started bonding over their common interest towards the computers and it didn’t matter if they were different. In spite of their characteristic differences, both Gates and Allen started spending time together working on different programs, and few times there were agreeing on each other’s ideas and other times it was vice versa but this difference did not stop them from achieving greatness. 

• At the age of 15, Gates and Allen formed a partnership and created "Traf-o-Data," computer software that tracked traffic patterns in Seattle. They made a profit of ＄20,000 as a result of their efforts. Gates and Allen planned to establish their own business, but his parents wanted him to finish high school and attend college, where they thought he would pursue a career as a lawyer.

• Although Allen attended Washington State University and Gates attended Harvard, the two remained in touch. Allen dropped out of college after two years and went to work at Honeywell in Boston, Massachusetts. He gave Gates an issue of Popular Electronics magazine at the time, which had an article about the Altair 8800 mini-computer kit. The potential of what this machine may produce in the realm of personal computing enthralled both young guys.

• Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, a tiny firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, produced the Altair. Gates and Allen approached the firm, claiming to be working on a BASIC program to run the Altair computer. They didn't have an Altair or the code to run it in reality, but they wanted to know if MITs was interested in someone building such software. When the demonstration was asked by the president of MITS, both Gates and Allen spent the next two months writing a programme using the BASIC software at the Harwards computer lab. The program worked perfectly and Allen was hired at MITS and soon after that Gates followed his senior’s footsteps and left Harvard to work with him and that is how together both Allen and Gates founded Microsoft. 

Bill Gates Experience

• Bill Gates along with Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1976 as soon as they formed a contract with MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) to help them develop a basic operating system for their new microcomputer. For the next two months, both Gates and Allen would review every line of the code and they were also responsible for other Microsoft businesses such as the sending of the orders. 

• In 1980, Microsoft got its big break when IBM approached them about developing a new BASIC operating system for its new machines. IBM was by far the most popular PC maker in the early 1980s. However, IBM PC clones which were the computers made by other firms that are compatible with IBM's had become more popular. Microsoft worked hard to get these other firms to buy its operating system. As a result, Microsoft was able to acquire a dominating position in software development at the same time as the personal computer industry was booming. Other businesses have tried to dislodge Microsoft as the main provider of computer operating software since its early supremacy. Even to date programs like Microsoft Word and Excel have stood against the test of time and have become the industry standard. 

Bill Gates and Windows Software 

• Microsoft introduced the first version of Windows in 1990. Because it replaced text interfaces with graphical interfaces, this was a breakthrough in operating software. It quickly became a best-seller, capturing the vast majority of the operating system market. In 1995, Microsoft introduced Windows 95, which set new standards and functionalities for operating systems. From Windows 2000 to Windows XP and Vista, this version of Windows has served as the foundation for all subsequent versions. Throughout his days as the CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates was considered to be very competitive in nature and his rivalry with Steve jobs made thighs interesting for the company. Bill Gates started diversifying the business in Microsoft and started expanding the business in various fields. 

• Microsoft has been successful in various fields but it has never been successful in the area of search engines.MSN live search has failed to acquire a market share of more than 5%. Microsoft has been outclassed by Google in this area. Nonetheless, Microsoft's success in monopolizing key sectors of the software business has resulted in many antitrust lawsuits. Microsoft came close to being split up into three smaller businesses in the 1998 US v Microsoft case. On appeal, however, Microsoft was able to remain a single company. Despite being the dominating computer business in the 1980s and 1990s, Microsoft is today viewed as an old and failing enterprise, especially when contrasted to the more active Google and Apple.