William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington into an upper middle class family. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and United Way. At age 13, Gates enrolled in the Lakeside School, a private preparatory school, and it was at this time that he wrote his first software program. In eighth grade, Gates implemented tic-tac-toe on a General Electric computer using the programming language BASIC that allowed users to play games against the computer. In high school, he founded the project Traf-O-Data to make traffic-counting systems based on the Intel 8008 microprocessor that were sold to local governments.
Gates excelled in school: he was a National Merit Scholar and scored a 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT. He enrolled at Harvard University in 1973 and took many mathematics and graduate-level computer sciences courses. However, he dropped out after only two years to start his own company.
Bill Gates and his childhood friend, Paul Allen, saw an opportunity to start their own computer software company after the MITS Altair 8800, which used the Intel 8080 microprocessor chip, was released in 1975. Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he was working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In reality, Gates and Allen did not even have an Altair or any code for it, and they only wanted to gauge MITS’s interest. The president of the company, Ed Roberts, agreed to meet them for a demonstration. Over the course of a few weeks, they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer and then made the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC.
Allen named their company “Micro-Soft”, a combination of the words “microcomputer” and “software.” On November 26, 1976, the trade name “Microsoft” was registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico. Microsoft’s Altair BASIC was a success and was popular with computer hobbyists. In late 1976, Microsoft became independent of MITS, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems. On January 1, 1979, the company moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington.
During Microsoft’s early years, Gates oversaw the business details but continued to write code as well. He claims to have personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped in the first five years. Microsoft dominated the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Windows. Microsoft went public in 1986, and its initial public offering was a huge success.
Steve Ballmer, who Gates met at Harvard, replaced him as CEO in 2000. Gates was the largest individual shareholder of Microsoft until May, 2014. Since leaving Microsoft, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the world’s largest private charity.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bill-Gates
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Microsoft-Corporation
https://www.britannica.com/technology/Altair-computer
Gates, while not a political figure, is one of the most important public figures of all time. Dude has more influence than a lot of people give him credit for, he basically put the PC in all of our homes.
ReplyDeleteYour post was very informative about the history of Gates and Microsoft. As we learned in class, Gates was incredibly skilled in both the computer side and the business side, which we may observe to be reflected in his deal with MITS. His contact with the president of MITS despite not yet having a working prototype showed his drive and confidence that he would succeed. Bold moves such as these must have contributed to Gates' later success.
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