Bill Gates

Who doesnt know about this man? I mean, Everyone knows about him. He is the founder of Microsoft with his partner Paul Allen.

Before Microsoft…

Family
Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on 28th October 1955. He was born and raised there by his father, William H. Gates II, who is the Seattle attorney and his late mother, Mary Gates, who was a schoolteacher in University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International. He came from a family of entrepreneurship.

School Life
In the age of thirteen, he enrolled in an exclusive preparatory school which was Lakeside School. On year 8, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) which is the high level of programming language. To pursue his interest, he was excused from math class to learn the GE system. The first program that he wrote on the machine was the implementation of tic-tac-toe so that you can play against the computer. He was fascinated by the machine, how it executes the code perfectly. His comment was "There was just something neat about this machine."

Bill gates and his friends - Paul Allen, Ric Weiland and Kent Evans - were banned from using the PDP-10 that belong to the Computer Center Cooperation because they was caught for exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time. After the ban, they offered to search for the bug to the CCC's for the exchange of the computer time. But instead of use teletype to seeing the system, Gates went to the CCC's office and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system.

The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970. This arrangement was over because CCC went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success."

At age 17, Gates formed a business enterprise with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and subsequently enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 1973. Prior to the mid-1990s, an SAT score of 1590 corresponded roughly to an IQ of 170, a figure that has been cited frequently by the press. While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, which he later appointed as CEO of Microsoft. He also met computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou at Harvard, which collaborated on a paper about pancake sorting. He did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard and spent a lot of time using the school's computers. He remained in contact with Paul Allen, joining him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974. The following year seeing the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their computer software company. He had talked this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a company.


Microsoft the making…

Founding Microsoft
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they just wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS. and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November 1975. They named their partnership "Micro-Soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque. Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico.

Fighting against piracy
Microsoft's BASIC was popular with people who have interest on computer, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment. Computer hobbyist didn’t take note of the letter, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems. The company moved from Albuquerque to its new home in Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979

Partnership with IBM
In 1980, IBM came to Microsoft to write the BASIC interpreter for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC. When IBM's representatives said that they needed an operating system, Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the widely used CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) operating system. IBM's discussions with Digital Research were unsuccessful, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a following meeting with Gates and told him to get an acceptable operating system. A few weeks later Gates proposed using 86-DOS (QDOS), an operating system similar to CP/M that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had made for hardware similar to the PC. Microsoft made a deal with SCP to become the exclusive licensing agent, and later the full owner, of 86-DOS. After adapting the operating system for the PC, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS in exchange for a one-time fee of $50,000. Gates insisted that IBM let Microsoft keep the copyright on the operating system, because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM's system. They did, and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a leading company in the industry.

Life as a Bill Gates..

Family and Property
Gates married Melinda French and have three children; Jennifer Katharine(1996), Rory John(1999) and Phoebe Adele(2002). The Gateses' home is an earth-sheltered house in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006 the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is $991,000. Also among Gates's private acquisitions is the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci, which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994. Gates is also known as an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby.

The more you get the more you give
As rich man, Gates found the expectation of him to give charity to other people. Seeing that expectation, he decided to sell some of his Microsoft stock to crate the William H. Gates Foundation. In 2000, Gates and his wife combined three family foundations into one to create the charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the largest transparently operated charitable foundation in the world. He and his wife, Melinda, have endowed a foundation with more than $28.8 billion (as of January 2005) to support philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that in the 21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available for all people. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $3.6 billion to organizations working in global health; more than $2 billion to improve learning opportunities, including the Gates Library Initiative to bring computers, Internet Access and training to public libraries in low-income communities in the United States and Canada; more than $477 million to community projects in the Pacific Northwest; and more than $488 million to special projects and annual giving campaigns.

(to be continued)