William Henry “Bill” Gates III was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington in a fairly wealthy family of William Henry “Bill” Gates, Sr. – a successful attorney and Mary Maxwell Gates – a former school teacher, who later became a member of the Board of Directors of the First Interstate Bank. Being a child, Bill Gates already possessed a prospective businessman talent, especially in mathematics. It is not accidental that at school he scored 800 points in the mathematical part of the intelligence test, showing the best result. However, the family expected Bill Gates to follow his father’s steps and enter Harvard Law School. In 1968, he met with his best friend Paul Allen in high school and from that point is where they started to spend most of their free time writing programs and figuring out how to make the computer to do interesting things. Fortunately, a new student arrived in Lakeside, whose father worked as a senior programmer in Computer Center Corporation (CCC). The new contract allowed Gates and his friends to continue their experiments. Meanwhile, the company’s business began to suffer from constant failures and poor protection.
Remembering the destructive activities of computer users from Lakeside, CCC invited Bill Gates and his friends to identify flaws and security holes. As a payment, the company offered endless computer time for young hackers. In 1969, the Computer Center Corporation experienced difficulties once again, and in 1970, it declared itself a bankrupt.
The Lakeside’s students lost their job and access to computer time. In 1971, the Information Sciences hired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to create software that would be make-up payroll sheet. In 1973, Bill Gates entered Harvard University, intending either to follow the footsteps of his father or to become a professor of Mathematics. Later Bill admitted that his heart
wasn’t in it. Most of his time spent at Harvard: he was playing pinball, bridge, or poker. Paul Allen, Bill’s friend, often visited him on weekends, and they were debating about the prospects of opening their own company. In June, 1975, Bill Gates creates a company for software development and names it Microsoft (the first version was Micro-Soft). Despite of the hard work of its employees, the company at first experienced some difficulties with distribution of any software products. The company did not have enough money to hire a good sales manager, so this function was performed by Bill Gates’ mother Mary Maxwell Gates. In 1976, the company's income had dropped at it's lowest affordability point caused by illegal copying of software and the use of it without permission of the creator or it is also defined as 'piracy'. Gates wrote an open letter in February 1976, which was published in a newsletter for Altair users. In response, the Gates Foundation has received 300 letters, but only a few of them contained a check. In 1976, it became obvious that Bill Gates could not continue his studies and manage a growing company at the same time. In December, he left the university, despite of all the objections of his parents, and fully engaged with the business. At that time, he was only twenty one. Then, the young businessmen got a lucky strike and the profit of Microsoft sales reached $500,000 dollars for the 1977 financial year. In 1979, Bill received an offer from IBM to create an operating system for the world’s first personal computer. However, Bill Gates was forced to deny the proposal of IBM, as he did not have any drafts for creating OS at the moment. Therefore, the CEO of Microsoft was forced to recommend International Business Machine (IBM) to seek help from its competitor Digital Research, which later will be the developer of the OS for IBM personal computer.
Meanwhile, Microsoft buys a ‘crude’ operating system 86-DOS for $50,000 dollars from the Seattle Computer and hires Tim Paterson, the creator of 86-DOS. In September 1980, IBM signed a detailed contract with Microsoft. This contract was destined to change the history of the personal computer industry. Both IBM and Microsoft benefited from it. In 1981, Microsoft becomes a corporation, the management of which is shared between Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Later the next year Gates convinced IBM management that MS-DOS should be sold under the license and other computer manufacturers, thereby making the
competition of Apple, which was selling its computers based on its own operating system. In 1983, The Microsoft Hardware group (formed in 1982) creates a manipulator called ‘Mouse’ for an easy data input into a computer with a graphical user interface. In the same year, the corporation presents a text editor for MS-DOS. In addition to all of these, the company of Bill Gates announced Windows – the extension of the operating system for MS-DOS as a universal operating environment for graphics applications. In 1993, the number of registered users of Microsoft Windows reached 25 million people. Thus, Windows becomes the most popular operating system in the world with a graphical interface. It goes without saying that since this then, Microsoft started to dominate an entire industry – it owned about 44 percent of all profits software market. Since that, Windows had launched several versions such as Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 7 and and recently the release of Windows 8 in 2012.
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