As Bill Gates Moves out of his office to be full time philanthropist, its the end of a great era. Here is the story of the great tech saga of William H. Gates III (Bill Gates).
Bill Gates was born on Oct. 28, 1955, in Seattle to William H. Gates II, a Seattle attorney and Mary Gates, a schoolteacher and chairwoman of United Way International. He attended public elementary school and the private Lakeside School where he discovered his interest in software and began programming computers at the age of 13.
In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman, where he lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, now Microsoft’s chief executive officer. While at Harvard, Gates developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer – the MITS Altair.
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems and provided them with the Altair BASIC, and formed Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen.
In his junior year, Gates left Harvard to pursue his dreams for Microsoft, believing that the computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home.
A partnership with IBM worked out that required Microsoft to make the BASIC interpreter for the IBM PC. Later on, Gates struck another deal with IBM, allowing IBM to package Microsoft’s PC-DOS software with IBM’s personal computers in exchange for a fee paid to Microsoft for every computer sold. This deal established Microsoft as a major player in the software industry.
IBM later adopted its own operating software and relations between Microsoft and IBM strained.
In 1983 Microsoft introduced its Word word-processing program and announced plans to create Windows operating system. In 1985 the first version of Windows was shipped and Windows 95 shipped a decade later followed by Internet Explorer 2.0.
In 1999, Gates wrote Business @ the Speed of Thought, a book that shows how computer technology can solve business problems in fundamentally new ways. The book was published in 25 languages and is available in more than 60 countries.
In addition to his love of computers and software, Gates founded Corbis, which is developing one of the world’s largest resources of visual information – a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe.
Gates now plans to focus on philanthropy with his wife Melinda and together they have endowed a foundation with more than $28.8 billion to support philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that in the 21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available for all people.
Source: Tech2
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