William Henry Gates III ( born October 28, 1955 ), known in the world as Bill Gates, is an American businessman, computer scientist, philanthropist, software developer, investor, author, known for being the creator of Microsoft with Paul Allen. He is considered one of the best known entrepreneurs of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Bill Gates was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. His father, William Henry Gates 11, was a prominent lawyer and his mother, Mary Gates, served on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank System and the United Way of America. His maternal grandmother was JW Maxwell, a national Bank President. The family lived in the Sand Point area of Seattle. His family regularly attended Church and prepared him to compete always. Bill Gates success came from a combination of hard work, intelligence, timing, business sense, and luck. Gates constantly challenged his employees to work hard and innovate, but he also worked as hard as the people who worked for him.
Bill Gates studied at the private Lakeside Elite School in Seattle, where he began to show interest in computer science. At the age of thirteen he wrote his first software program. He was a National Merit Scholar when he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholarship Aptitude Test ( SAT ) and enrolled at Harvard University in 1973, and studied there for two years. On April 4, 1975 ,while being a student at Harvard university, he found the Microsoft software company along with his friend Paul Allen. A year later, he retired from the university to move to Albuquerque, New Mexico, headquarters of ITS ( Instrumentation and Telemetry System ), to agree with that company the session of 50 percent of the language for basic computers.
In 1979, Microsoft began to grow, and Bill Gates decided to move his company to Seattle. Around 1980, he met with the representative of IBM, where he managed to sell them the MS-DOS operating system. As he still did not have it , he bought it from a young programmer, IBM needed that operating system to be able to compete with Apple. After a while, Microsoft bought the copyright of QDOS from Tim Paterson, who worked for Seattle Computer Products. Aware of the importance of the graphic environment that Apple had shown, Bill Gates visited them to offer his help to improve their spreadsheets and other programs, obtaining an Apple-Microsoft alliance. Under the management of Bill Gates, Microsoft legally got the technology of the graphic and mouse environment, and brought it to the market for Microsoft Windows, as a direct competitor of the Macintosh.
In 1992, President Bush recognized the importance of the work of Bill Gates by awarding him the National Medal of Technology. Around 1983, Bill Gates revolutionized personal computing again with the introduction of the “mouse” and a new graphical interface called to replace DOS ( Windows ). The same year, his friend Paul Allen left Microsoft, due to the health problems. During this time, the company focused on the promotion of the multimedia supports, especially in the educational field. Bill Gate's talent had been revealed in multiple computer programs whose use was spread throughout the world as basic languages of personal computers; but also in the success of a flexible and competitive company, managed with heterodox criteria.
The constant innovations of Bill Gates began to contribute to the rapid diffusion of the use of personal computing, producing a transcendental technical evolution in the ways of producing, transmitting and consuming information. In 1994, he acquired a manuscript of Leonardo Da Vinci for 25 million dollars and married Melinda French. On June 16, 2006 , Bill Gates made public his attention to abandon his daily duties at the head of Microsoft to dedicate himself completely to the foundation and on June 27, 2008, he retired from the work in front of Microsoft transferring control of the company to Steve Ballmer. Bill Gates devotes 70% of his time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the other 30% to the company.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:
Besides being a computer expert, Bill Gates and his wife created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation located in the city of Seattle, which was created in January 2000, when the Gates foundation for learning and the William foundation joined Henry Gates. The foundation is directed by Bill Gates’s father William Henry Gates and Patty Stonesifer. In May 2006, the Bill Gates foundation was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation. For the year 2004, the foundation developed $200 million in campaign to promote AIDS prevention in India, the largest grant program in a single country. The effort had promotional help from Hollywood. Microsoft, a company led by Bill Gates, employs many Indian engineers in the United States and has had 1000 employees in India.
Image Credits:
Comments