Essays

He has been characterized as the quintessential example of a super-intelligent human being with immense power and wealth. Every minute, every second when you are on your PC, he guides you. Every computer in the world comes with his software pre-installed! With this hint, I am sure, you can gauge the fact that we are talking about Microsoft and the brain behind it—Bill Gates.

The American entrepreneur, philanthropist and the Chairman of Microsoft, was born on October 28, 1955. As a student, Gates excelled in elementary school, particularly in Mathematics and Sciences. At 13, he enrolled in the Lakeside | School, Seattle's most exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the school mothers used proceeds from Lakeside's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time in a General Electric Computer. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from Maths classes to pursue his interest. After the Mothers' Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on other systems, including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Centre Corporation, which banned the Lakeside students for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.

At the end of the ban, the Lakeside students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in Exchange for free computer time. Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, not only in BASIC but FORTRAN, LISP and machine language as well. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, then it went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences Inc. hired the Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them not only computer time but royalities as well At the age of 14, Gates was dexterous enough to form a venture with Alien, called Traf-0-Data, to make traffic counters based on Intel 8. 008 processor. That first year, he made $ 20,000, however, when his age was discovered business slowed down.

Since the beginning, Bill Gates was on the lookout for opportunities- So, after reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800/ Gates contacted MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the creators of the new microcomputer He informed them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform, MITS President, Ed Roberts, agreed to meet them for a demo and when Gates demonstrated his work, it was a S success. Paul Alien, Gates' intimate friend was hired into MITS, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Alien at MITS, dubbing their partnership "Micro-Soft" in November, 1975. Within a year, the hyphen was dropped and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems.

In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to make the BASIC interpreter for its upcoming personal computer, IBM PC. Gates proposed using 86-DOS (QDOS), an operating system. After adapting the operating system for PC, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS. As several companies reverse-engineered the IBM architecture and developed clones, Microsoft was quick to license DOS to other manufacturers, calling it MS-DOS (for Microsoft Disk Operating System), Keeping pace with time, in the early 1980s, Microsoft released "Windows" as an addition and alternative to their DOS command line, and to compete with other systems in the market. By the early 1990s. Windows had pushed other DOS-based systems out of the market. The release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 was a tremendous success, selling around 10 million copies in the first two years and cementing Microsoft's dominance in operating systems' sales. It gradually became the largest software company in the world.

Gates has been continuing to drive the world with his genius. 'Forbes' magazine's list of the 'The World's Billionaires has ranked him as the richest person in the world since 1995, and recent estimates put his net worth near $ 56 billion. Since amassing his fortune, he has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavours through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.