Not everyone could
become the wealthiest person in the world and definitely not for thirteen
consecutive years. But it’s not the wealth of money we should be talking about.
It’s about the wealth of knowledge and the contribution a person makes to the
world. And we can say that the wealth garnered by this person in his lifetime
definitely speaks less of his achievements even though he may have earned tens
of billions. You might have got an idea whom we’re speaking of now, haven’t
you? Yes, that person is none other than William Henry Gates III, mostly known
to us as Bill Gates, the co-founder of the world renowned Microsoft
Corporation.
BIRTH
AND CHILDHOOD:
Bill Gates was born to
William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates,on October 28, 1955. His parents
were prominent lawyer and one among the board of directors for First Interstate
BancSystem respectively. He was the second child with an elder and younger
sister and he was called “trey” as his father was Gates II and he would be
Gates III. Since childhood, Gates grew up in a competitive atmosphere promoted
by his family. They would always conduct some games and competitions where the
winner would get a reward and loser would receive some penalty.
PASSION
FOR COMPUTERS:
Gates had an early
interest in computers and during his schooling at Lakeside School he sought out
an interest in the then famous language BASIC and he got permission to get excused
from Mathematics class to pursue this programming on a General Electric
Computer. His passion for programming and computer gaming was so much that he,
along with three other Lakeside students were banned from the school for
exploiting the bugs in the OS of a
PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center
Corporation.
Recognizing the rare
abilities of these four young men, the CCC offered computer time to fix the
computer bugs in their systems and they continued this until 1970 which was
when the company ran out of business.
Later, they were hired by Information Sciences, Inc. to write a payroll
program in COBOL in exchange for royalties.
LOGGING
IN AND STEPPING OUT OF HARVARD:
After his graduation
in the year 1973 from the Lakeside School, Gates scored 1590 out of 1600 on SAT
reasoning test and later enrolled at Harvard College where he met his future
Microsoft CEO successor Steve Balmer.
Gates continued
pursuing his passion for computers even after joining Harvard and he held the
record of devising the fastest solution in the form of an algorithm for pancake
sorting. The year 1975 marked the release of MITS Altair 8800 based on the
Intel 8080 CPU and both Gates and Paul Allen saw this as an opportunity to
start their own software company. They both dropped out of Harvard and their
parents too were supportive of their decision after recognizing their passion
in that field.
ESTABLISHING
MICROSOFT:
After demonstrating
the BASIC programming language that would be compatible with the MITS developed
Altair to its head Ed Roberts, MITS purchased the software and hired Paul Allen
and Bill Gates. The partnership of Gates and Allen at MITS led to the
establishment of Micro-soft which had its first office located in Albuquerque.
It was changed to Microsoft on November 26, 1976 and it was registered with the
Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico.
During the early years
of Microsoft, Bill Gates had dealt with the generation and editing of the code
while overlooking the business details. Microsoft was relocated in Bellevue,
Washington in the year 1979 from Albuquerque.
JOINING
HANDS WITH IBM:
With the introduction
of UNIX operating system, Microsoft created new software Xenix but this was not
received well because its functionality had not reached the expectations. Gates
and team then took up the task of designing a command line interface that would
require a very minimum number of boot files but performing basic tasks on a
computer. They had succeeded in creating that which required just 5 boot files.
This is how MS-DOS came into existence.
International Business
Machines Corporation was very much impressed with this creation that they had
integrated this software into all of their computers. With this success
collaboration, Microsoft later developed a number of languages for the IBM
Corporation like GW Basic, C language and Flight Simulator etc. IBM had its
systems run on the operating system OS/2 designed by Microsoft and they had
their partnership until 1990.
DEVELOPING
WINDOWS:
Bill Gates was
instrumental in the development of success of the most used operating system
Windows. After the OS/2 operating
system, he had made many advanced modification and released Windows 95. With
its success and in the span of few years, Microsoft had developed a series of
Operating Systems which include Windows 98, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7
and 8.
While Windows XP
achieved worldwide acclaim and considered the best, Vista was considered a
failure. It was not until the introduction of Windows 7 that users tried to
change their operating systems from Windows XP. Microsoft is now planning to
release a newer version of Windows i.e. Windows 9 in the month of April, 2014.
STEPPING
DOWN FROM CEO POST:
After nearly 25 years
after the establishment of Microsoft, Bill Gates stepped down as CEO in
Microsoft in the year of 2000 during the month of January but still remained as
chairman and created the post of chief software architect for himself. He
assumed the full time duties until June 27, 2008 when he transformed into a
part-time worker in order to balance the duties at Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation. Microsoft appointed Satya Nadella as
CEO in February 2014 and Bill Gates
stepped down as chairman and assumed the duties of technology advisor to the
newly appointed CEO.
PERSONAL
LIFE:
Bill Gates married one
of the employees of Microsoft, Melinda French on January 1, 1994. Their first
daughter, Jennifer Katharine, was born in the year 1996 and then a son, Rory,
in 1999 and again a daughter, Phoebe Adele, in 2002. The Gates family resides
at an earth-sheltered house in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington
in Medina.
RECOGNITION,
ACCOLADES AND CONTROVERSIES:
Bill Gates is the only
person to be consistently ranked for thirteen times from 1995 to 2007 according
to the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people. He was third in the 2008
and regained the first position back again in 2009. Bloomberg Billionaires
named him the world’s richest person again in 2013.
Along with great
recognition and a number of accolades, Gates also has been criticized for his
business tactics which were considered unconventional and anti-competitive and
was upheld by judicial courts.
In spite of all those
controversies, Gates has always been a charitable person devoting most of his
time for philanthropic endeavors and providing incentives for the needed
through the organization co-founded by him and his wife Bill and Melinda Gates
foundation.
He and his wife were
awarded with Jefferson award for greatest public service benefitting the
disadvantaged. Apart from that the following are the different awards and
accolades achieved by Bill Gates:
• Times one of the 100 most influential
people in the 20th century.
• One of the members among the Sunday Times
power list in 1999.
• One of the top influential people in media
in 2001.
• Fourth most powerful person in the world in
2012 according to Forbes.
• He was made honorary Knight Commander of
the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005.
• Bower Award for Business Leadership from
the Franklin Institute in 2010.
• Silver Buffalo Award by the Boy Scouts of
America in 2010.
Not only as a
revolutionary computer entrepreneur, Bill Gates garnered wide acclaim
throughout the world as a great philanthropist.
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