We have previously talked on our blog about Steve Jobs, so the next logical thing is to talk about Bill Gates. We know, that computer world is divided in two sectors: Microsoft lovers and Apple lovers.
Most of the time one side hates the other. If you are on either of sides, everyone should know how interesting both of these gentlemen are…
William Henry "Bill" Gates III was born on October 28th 1955 in Seattle, Washington.
He was born into very prestigious family. His father was prominent lawyer, mother served on the board of directors for several organisations and Bill's grandfather was a national bank president.
His parents intended him to be a lawyer and encouraged him to compete in everything.
When Bill was 13 he enrolled in Lakeside School where he became interested in programming.
Young Bill was excused from math classes to have more time for programming.
Soon after Bill along with other four classmates were banned of using computer for couple of months, because they found bug and managed to obtain free computer time.
Bill fell in love with computer programming and was really good at it. In 1970 school asked him to write program scheduling students into classes. He hacked the code afterwards, so he was in class with as many beautiful girls as he could.
Bill Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 points in standardized test (SAT).
He enrolled Harvard in the same year where he's met Steve Ballmer — one of the most important partners in his future company — Microsoft.
When Bill was on Harvard he started to consider becoming a lawyer, until he read about MITS's microcomputer — Altair 8800 in the magazine. He wrote to MITS claiming he's been working on a code — BASIC for Altair (in fact he wasn't).
Company's president agreed to meet Gates to show him the BASIC demo, so Gates started to work on it. They closed a deal and Gates dropped out of Harvard.
A year later Bill Gates registered Microsoft, but they were still working on BASIC. In late 1976 Microsoft became independent from MITS and continued to work on programming language for all kinds of hardware.
The next few years he spent on reading and editing all the lines of codes produced by his employees. He worked for 16 hours a day!
In 1980 Gates buys operating system from SCP (Seattle Computer Products) for $50,000 in order to edit it and sell it to IBM. It worked and the legend was born — MS-DOS. Sales of the this operating system made Microsoft a major player in the industry.
Microsoft started developing operating system for Apple. Steve Jobs wanted Apple to dominate computer business. He asked Bill to join his company with the role of programming.
Bill wasn't stupid and knew, that operating system with graphics is the future and he disagrees. This is how they became rivals.
Microsoft was secretly copying Macintosh OS, which escalated to Apple's accusation of Microsoft from stealing their ideas. This rivality lasted for next 15 year.
In 1985 Windows 1.0 was published and it received only small popularity. It extended MS-DOS and it could not compete with Apple's Lisa.
Several next versions were produced by Microsoft, but really ground-breaking one was Windows 95, which started the huge success of Windows operating system.
Bill Gates married Melinda French in 1994. They have 3 children and are still happily married. Bill Gates is without a doubt one of the most interesting persons of a modern history. He donated about a half of his wealth.
He became friend with Steve Jobs in 1997 again and still talks about him as one of the most important and influential person of his career.
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