the early life of bill gates

the early life of bill gates

Bill Gates was born as William Henry Gates III on 28th October 1955, in Seattle (Unites States). One of the three children of William Henry Gates II, a Seattle attorney, he was also the only son. His mother, late Mary Gates, was a schoolteacher, Regent of University of Washington, and Chairwoman of United Way International. He spent his childhood in Seattle and attended public elementary school and the private Lakeside School. It was there that he started developing an interest in software. Bill Gates was only 13 when he began programming computers.

Bill Gates grew up in an upper middle-class family with two sisters: Kristianne, who is older, and Libby, who is younger. Their father, William H. Gates, Sr., was a promising, if somewhat shy, law student when he met his future wife, Mary Maxwell. She was an athletic, outgoing student at the University of Washington, actively involved in student affairs and leadership. The Gates family atmosphere was warm and close, and all three children were encouraged to be competitive and strive for excellence. Bill showed early signs of competitiveness when he coordinated family athletic games at their summer house on Puget Sound. He also relished in playing board games (Risk was his favorite) and excelled in Monopoly.

Bill had a very close relationship with his mother, Mary, who after a brief career as a teacher devoted her time to helping raise the children and working on civic affairs and with charities. She also served on several corporate boards, among them First Interstate Bank in Seattle (founded by her grandfather), the United Way, and International Business Machines (IBM). She would often take Bill along on her volunteer work in schools and community organizations.

Bill was a voracious reader as a child, spending many hours pouring over reference books such as the encyclopedia. Around the age of 11 or 12, Bill's parents began to have concerns about his behavior. He was doing well in school, but he seemed bored and withdrawn at times. His parents worried he might become a loner. Though they were strong believers in public education, when Bill turned 13 they enrolled him in Seattle's Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. He blossomed in nearly all his subjects, excelling in math and science, but also doing very well in drama and English.

While at Lakeside School, a Seattle computer company offered to provide computer time for the students. The Mother's Club used proceeds from the school's rummage sale to purchase a teletype terminal for students to use.

Gates found himself at the right place at the right time.

Gates's early experiences with computers included debugging (eliminating errors from) programs for the Computer Center Corporation's PDP-10, helping to computerize electric power grids for the Bonneville Power Administration, and founding with Allen a firm called Traf-O-Data while still in high school. Their small company earned them twenty thousand dollars in fees for analyzing local traffic patterns.

While working with the Computer Center's PDP-10, Gates was responsible for what was probably the first computer virus, a program that copies itself into other programs and ruins data. Discovering that the machine was connected to a national network of computers called Cybernet, Gates invaded the network and installed a program on the main computer that sent itself to the rest of the network's computers, making it crash (became damaged). When Gates was found out, he was severely punished, and he kept away from computers for his entire junior year at Lakeside. Without the lure of computers, Gates made plans for college and law school in 1970. But by 1971 he was back helping Allen write a class scheduling program for their school's computer.

Gates soon befriended a student named Paul Allen and together using the schools minicomputer they practiced their skills.

They turned to a computing company, in exchange for free use of a more powerful computer they searched for bugs in the computers system while also learning new languages. Bill went on to Harvard University and while there teamed up with Paul to write a new version of Basic programming language for the first personnel computer the Altair 8800. The company was impressed with Gates and Allen’s work and licensed the software resulting in Gates and Allen forming the company Microsoft to develop software for other companies. Bill dropped out of Harvard to spend more time on the new business.

"To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential." Microsoft Mission Statement
After dropping out of Harvard Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen set about revolutionizing the computer industry. Gates believed there should be a computer on every office desk and in every home.

In 1975 the company Micro-soft was formed, which was an abbreviation of microcomputer software. It soon became simply "Microsoft"® and went on to completely change the way people use computers.

Microsoft helped to make the computer easier to use with its developed and purchased software, and made it a commercial success. The success of Microsoft began with the MS-DOS computer operating system that Gates licensed to IBM. Gates also set about protecting the royalties that he could acquire from computer software by aggressively fighting against all forms of software piracy, effectively creating the retail software market that now exists today. This move was quite controversial at the time as it was the freedom of sharing that produced much innovation and advances in the newly forming software industry. But it was this stand against software piracy, that was to be central in the great commercial success that Microsoft went on to achieve.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Gates has been criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts.

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