The Story of Bill Gates

Bill gates, the founder of Microsoft, and the richest person in the world, is a person well known all over the world. How did this happen? What did he do to create Microsoft? What was he like as a child? This biography will answer some of these questions.

William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. His mother's name was Mary Maxwell, his father's William Gates II; he also had two sisters in his family. He attended a normal school, but there was a problem…. He misbehaved all the time in there, but he was a really smart boy. His teachers later described him as a nerd. His parents found that the cause of this misbehaviour was because he had nothing to do, and he got bored. They decided to buy the new edition of The World Book Encyclopaedia to combat his boredom. But he quickly read all the entire set. The first time Bill saw a computer was at the “Seattle World's Fair” when he was 7 (1962), it was an IBM microcomputer.

In 1967 Bill's parents decided to move him to a private school, the Lakeside School. His parents wanted him to like sports but he refused to go practice a sport, instead of playing he was reading all the time or just sitting around thinking. Later he became a member of the science and math group. In these groups he met a new friend, Kent Evans, a boy obsessed with making money, whom his teachers described as a “forty-year-old businessman”.

In the summer of 1968 the Lakeside School decided to find a way for students to have access to a computer. They wanted the school to have technology. In this times the computers were 4 times bigger, they were huge machines, and complicated to use. The Lakeside School, decided to buy the ASR-33 Teletype, although it was very noisy. Bill became very excited about this idea. They divided the kids that liked computers in two different groups, one group were the kids that were interested in hardware, and the other the ones who were interested in software; Bill and Kent decide to go to software.

At this time using a computer was very difficult, because people had to know a programming language, and the most accessible was BASIC. Bill became an expert in BASIC, and was soon writing programs to help him solve math calculations, or just games. Burt a wonderful thing happened, a new company, “Computer Centre Corporation,” started settling in Seattle, and they installed the PDP-10. When this company learned about Bill and his friends creating smalls software, they led them use the computers for free if they promised to crash them, in this computers there were bugs that needed to be fixed, and the company let Bill and his friends to do this job for them for free. Bill was very excited with the idea, and became the best crasher in the group. However, he got tired of crashing the computers and he started programming in BASIC. He made a war game, but he never finished; he was always adding new features to the game. Bill became obsessed with computers. At this time Bill's grades improved.

Bill and Kent met a new friend, Paul Allen, who was a freshman at the time Bill and Kent were in their junior year. What they had in common was their interest in making money. They started searching for ways of making money with the computers, creating sofwares. Paul discovered a PDP-10 at the University of Washington. The group moved to work there.

A computer company asked Paul to write a payroll program for them, Paul tried to do that by himself, but he couldn't, so he asked Bill and Kent to help him they did, and they did mostly of the work. Paul couldn't continue going to college and being in this business at the same time, so he decided to quit, and stay in college.

Paul and Kent finished the program, and were paid with 10000$ worth in renting computer time, but they had to spent that in less than a year. Later they were asked to make several programs for the school; they were very good at it. In the middle of a project of Bill and Kent, Kent decided to go to a mountain bike class, he fell from a 600 feet mountain and died, Bill broke into tears.

The school, asked Bill to do a schedule program, he finished it and won 4200 $, he became the smartest guy on campus. After Paul came back to Seattle from Washington D.C, he and Bill formed a new company, Trans-O-Data. They created a program that records the flows of traffic, but didn't work very well. Bill was about to go to college, and had no time to run Trans-O-Data.

Bill was meant to go Harvard University. It was his senior year, the company TRW, hire Paul and bill to write a project desperately behind schedule, the school, led Bill, to miss the remain of the year of school. He just went to Lakeside to do his final exams. He and Paul went to Vancouver to finish the project. Bill had to stop the project, because he had to attend Harvard, so he told Paul that he couldn't go on.

Bill decided to be an engineer, he decided to study math. This time he wasn't the smartest guy on campus, but anyway he was very good. He was still in the computers stuff. He continued creating programs, and all that.

A new computer came, the Altair 8800, it was a bad computer it had nothing, it just had a light that, turned on and of, there was no programming language. Bill and Paul started working on a programming language that would be useful for the Altair 8800, finished it, and presented it to the company. This company was surprised by the excellent work that they did, and they offered Paul a job as Vice President of the department of software.

Bill had decided to quit Harvard to create his own software company with Paul, Microsoft; this word came from “microcomputers” and “software.” The company IBM hired them to make an operating system for their computers; they created Dos, the first operating system by Microsoft. But there was a problem, the company Mac, started with another operating system called Mac, or Macintosh, which was friendly with the users, was easier to use, and fun. IBM hired them again for making a new operating system for their computers; they created the famous Windows 3.1, this software was awesome, the Microsoft company was getting bigger and bigger, windows 3.1 was sold like candies, there was when Bill Gates became the wealthiest men in the united states.

Bill Gates was a very interesting person. He was very intelligent in his childhood, but when he had nothing to do he got bored. The computers were introduced to him, and he take out that boredom, and his grades started to progress, he became an expert in the software area of the computer, and started his own company, Microsoft. IBM hired this company, and he became millionaire.

Bibliography

• Bill Gates. 4 Apr. 2003 <http://search.biography.com/print_record.pl?id=15061>.

• Bill Gates. 7 Apr. 2003 <http://www.thocp.net/biographies/gates_bill.htm>.

• Boyd, Aaron. Smart money the story of Bill Gates. N.P.: Greensboro. N.C. Morgan Reynolds, 1995.