Bill Gates Biography
William (Bill) H. Gates, he's a man of few words, many ideas, and he’s the richest man on Earth. Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle Washington. His father was an attorney and his mother was a school teacher. (Bill Gates, 1) Bill excelled in school, at Lakeside a private school. (Dickson, 91) At Lakeside he got his first encounter with computers, and it’s there that he first learned to program.
Lakeside had a pretty big budget so they bought a computer for the kids to play on. Many children took turns playing on it, but some got known as the “computer nerds”. Bill Gates was one of them. Another one was Paul Alan who played a large roll in the development of Microsoft, a multi-billion dollar business. Bill and his programming friends started up a club at Lakeside just for programming. They would make programs and sell them. At one point Bill was kicked out, but was quickly invited back in because his superb business skills were needed to make profit. Bill made his first program when he was thirteen years old, it was a tic-tac-toe program. (Dickson, 15) Since then he has advanced rapidly. One of his first big programs has “Traf-o-data,” which monitored traffic at stop lights. This program never really hit it big. At this time the government wasn’t interested in investing money in computers, but Bill saw a great future for them.
When Bill graduated from Lakeside he started attending Harvard
University. (Dickson, 91) There Bill found people who were smarted then him, something that he never found at Lakeside. Yet Bill rarely attended class, he was too busy starting up his business involving computers. A personal computer called MITS Altair had just come out, but it had no OS (Operating System). So Bill and Paul Alan set out to make one before any other company. They made an OS called BASIC. It could do simple task such as add, subtract, multiply, and divided; which at the time people found remarkable. Bill presented it to the owner of the MITS Altair and he accepted a deal with the young computer Microsoft. Bill hated to lose and wanted to beat other companies to the punch by developing newer and better programs before they did. (Dickson, 63) IBM made several deals with Microsoft. They had several versions of BASIC made for their personal computers that were made. This made Microsoft look good, and got their name known, which in time turned out to be the right move for Bill and Allan to make. Not long after Bill was making programs for several companies, one was Apple, which later filled a law suit against
Bill for stealing their idea. Bill first made excel for Apple. (Dickson, [next page]