Bill Gates :: essays research papers

Skinny, shy and awkward, teenaged Bill render seemed an marvellous successor to his oerachieving parents. His father, powerfully built and 66 tall, was a prominent Seattle attorney, and his gregarious buzz off served on charitable boards and ran the United Way. While he showed enormous giving for math and logic, young Bill, a middle child, was no ones idea of a natural leader, let alone a future billionaire who would reinvent American business.Born in 1955, gate attended public elementary school, and enrolled in the private Lakeside School at age 12. The succeeding(a) year, render wrote his first computer program, at a time when computers were still room-sized machines movement by scientists in white coats. Soon afterwards, he and his friend capital of Minnesota Allen wrote a scheduling program for the schoolwhich coincidentally placed the ii in the same classes as the prettiest girls in school. let off in gritty school, Gates and Allen founded a company called Traf-O-Data , which analyzed city traffic data.Gates set off for Harvard University intending to become a lawyer like his father. Still shy and awkward, he rarely ventured out to parties unless dragged by his friend Steve Ballmer, whom he later repaid by naming him president of Microsoft.One day in December 1974, Allen, who was working at Honeywell outside of Boston, showed Gates a customary Mechanics cover featuring the Altair 8800, a $397 computer from M.I.T.S. computing that any hobbyist could build. The all thing the computer lacked, besides a keyboard and monitor, was software. Gates and Allen contacted the head of M.I.T.S. and give tongue to they could provide a version of BASIC for the Altair.After a victorious demonstration at the companys Albuquerque headquarters, M.I.T.S. contracted with Gates and Allen for programming languages. The pair move to New Mexico and started Micro-soft (they dropped the hypen later). Although the companys first five clients went bankrupt, the company s truggled on, moving to Seattle in 1979. The following year, IBM asked Gates to provide an operating system for its first personal computer. Gates purchased a system called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $50,000 from another company, changed the name to MS-DOS, and licence it to IBM. The IBM PC took the market by storm when it was introduced in 1981and licensing fees streamed into Microsoft, ensuring the companys survival over the next several years.Microsoft continued concentrating on the software market, adding consumer applications like Microsoft word and Microsoft Excel.