Bill Gates
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Bill Gates
William Henry Gates, III (born October 28, 1955), commonly known as Bill Gates, is the co-founder (together with Paul Allen) and Chairman of Microsoft Corporation. According to Forbes magazine, he is the wealthiest man in the world. According to one estimate, Gates possesses more wealth than the poorest 50 percent of the world's population.
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2 Estimated wealth 3 Awards 4 Publications 5 Bill Gates in film 6 External links |
Bill Gates was born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. His parents were William Henry Gates, Jr, a corporate lawyer, and Mary Maxwell, board member of First Interstate Bank, Pacific Northwest Bell and the national board of United Way. Bill went to Lakeside, Seattle's most exclusive prep school, and later on went to study at Harvard University, but dropped out without graduating.
Bill Gates was a brilliant student who is generally remembered as being exceedingly egotistical; according to one account of his high school years, he predicted that he would be a billionaire by the age of 25. Of course, the fact that he could rely on a multi-million dollar trust fund established by his uncle James Willard Maxwell and his parents' influence in corporate circles, gave him a better chance to achieve this goal than most.
While he was a student at Harvard University he co-authored with Paul Allen the original Altair BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 in the mid 1970s. The Altair was the first commercially successful personal computer. Inspired by BASIC, an easy-to-learn programming language developed at Dartmouth College for teaching purposes, Gates' and Allen's version of BASIC later became Microsoft BASIC, the primary interpreted computer language of the MS-DOS operating system, which was the key to Microsoft's early commercial success. Microsoft Basic became Microsoft QuickBasic. When released without a compiler it is known as QBasic. QuickBasic evolved into Visual Basic, versions of which are still popular today.
In the early 1970s, Gates wrote the Open Letter to Hobbyists, which shocked the computer hobbyist community by insisting that a commercial market existed for computer software and that such software should not be freely copied without the publisher's permission. At the time, the community was strongly influenced by its ham radio legacy and the related Hacker ethic, which insist that innovations and knowledge should be freely shared in the community. Gates went on to co-found Microsoft Corporation, one of the world's most successful commercial enterprises, and led the way toward the emergence of the commercial software industry.
Gates went on to establish an unsavory reputation for his business practices. A case in point concerns the origins of MS-DOS. In the late 1970s, IBM was planning to enter the personal computer market in with its IBM Personal Computer (PC), which was released in 1981. IBM needed an operating system for its new computer, which was based on the newly developed, 16-bit architecture of the Intel x86 processor family. After briefly negotiating with another company (the Digital Research Corporation in California), IBM approached Microsoft. Without revealing their ties with IBM, Microsoft executives in turn approached Seattle Computer, which had developed an x86-based operating system, and purchased the operating system for a reported sum of $50,000. (In Microsoft's defense, they may have been under agreement not to discuss their talks with IBM, so they really couldn't have revealed their ties.) Microsoft subsequently licensed the operating system to IBM (which released it under the PC-DOS name) and worked with computer manufacturers to include its own version, called MS-DOS, with every computer system sold. Spectacularly successful, this deal was challenged in court by Seattle Computer on the grounds that Microsoft had concealed its relationship with IBM in order to purchase the operating system cheaply; subsequently, there was a settlement, but no admission of duplicity or guilt. Gates' reputation was further sullied by a series of major antitrust actions brought both by the U.S. Department of Justice and individual companies against Microsoft in the late 1990s.
In the mid-1980s Gates became excited about the possibilities of compact disc for storage, and sponsored the publication of the book CD-ROM: The New Papyrus that promoted the idea of CD-ROM.
It is incontestable that Gates has played hardball in the software industry. It has also been established in a court of law, and unanimously affirmed on appeal by a pro-business appellate court, that his company, under his leadership, repeatedly and egregiously engaged in business practices that violated U.S. laws.
Although Gates is often pictured as a visionary in software development, apart from his aggressive business tactics he has brought no innovations to this field. A case in point is the fact that his book The Road Ahead (1996) needed a significant rewrite less than six months after its initial release, because Gates, contrary to his peers, failed to foresee the Internet revolution.
In 2000, Gates promoted long-time friend and Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer to the role of Chief Executive Officer and took on the role of "Chief Software Architect".
On the personal side, Gates married Melinda French on January 1, 1994. They have three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002).
Along with his wife, Gates has also founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization. Critics have called this a response to negative public outcry over the seemingly monopolistic and anti-competitive practices of his company. To put this matter into perspective, it is worth remembering that these charitable contributions—whatever their motive—have provided sorely needed funds for underrepresented minority college scholarships, AIDS prevention, and other worthy causes.
In 1994, he acquired the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci; as of 2003 it was on display at the Seattle Art Museum.
Biography
Aged 21, image from a minor traffic violation (details)Estimated wealth
According to Forbes list of the World's Wealthiest People:
Source: [1]Awards
Publications
Bill Gates in film
External links
