BILL GATES AND MICROSOFT

Bill Gates and Microsoft

Bill Gates and Microsoft

Introduction

Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world. It distributes products worldwide and is the number one software company in the world. Microsoft would never have existed if it weren't for Bill Gates. Bill Gates was born on october28, 1955. He was born into a family that was successful in business and was living a pretty comfortable life in Seattle. In primary school Gates quickly shot to the head of most classes especially math's and science. Due to his excellence in his studies his parents enrolled him in lakeside prep school where he made fiends with Paul Allen. Here he was also first introduced to computers.

Bill Gates and Microsoft

Computer at the time were large and very expensive and the school couldn't afford one. Consequently the school struck agreements with some large computer companies that they would let their students use their computers. Gates, Allen and a few other boys took up computing. In fact they began to skip class in order to use the computers. Sometimes they would break in at night just too spent time on the computers. Gates and the other boys spent so much time on the computers they learnt how to hack into the system. They started deleting valuable files purposely and were eventually banned from the computers.

A few weeks later to Gates surprise, him and his friend Paul Allen were hired by the computer company, that was permitting the school use their computers, to find and fix bugs and prevent the computers from crashing. The computer company was a bit worried hiring two teenagers to fix their computers but their worries were quickly dissolved when Gates and Allen found a list of bugs that stretched over 300 pages long. Due to his success Gates was hired by his school to create a program for class scheduling. Gates created this program with ease using a language called 'FORTRAIN'. 'FORTRAIN' is still widely used in Microsoft today. Unfortunately, Gates was not paid for his work, instead he received some thing he treasured even more - unlimited computer time.

Considering all his computer success it would be logical for Gates to study computers at university. Instead he went to Harved to become a lawyer. Although he was at Harved he did not give up his work with computers. Him and friend Paul Allen kept in touch, constantly talking about computers and hoping that one day they will own their very own computer business. Allen continuously urged Gates to quit school and work with computers full time, but gates was unsure of what to do.

One year later the first microcomputer was released by MITS. The computer was called 'Altair' and it had no keyboard, mouse or monitor. When Gates and Allen heard about this they vowed to write a computer language for it. They stayed up for nights feverishly writing the program they promised. A meeting between MITS, Gates and Allen was held to test the ...