William Henry Gates III, popularly known as Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft is among the most successful entrepreneurs in the world of personal computers. Throughout his career in Microsoft, Bill Gates held different positions as that of the leading software engineer and the CEO of the company.
Life and schooling of Bill Gates
Bill Gates is born to William H. Gates and Mary Maxwell Gates in Washington’s Seattle. He attended the elementary school, and out shined in mathematics and science. However, his interest in computer grew when he was in eighth standard at the Lakeside School. It was at this time that he showed immense interest in the GE system programming in BASIC. This was shortly followed by the offer made to the students of the Lakeside School to detect viruses in the software of CCC. Instead of using the CCC system through teletype, Gates himself visited the offices of CCC to examine the source code of several programs running in the LISP and FORTRAN and not only in BASIC, as well as in machine languages. In fact, his keen interests in computer programming were evident right from his school-going days.
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Bill Gates and his career in Microsoft
Bill Gates contacted the makers of microcomputer - Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in 1975 January and informed them that he and his fellow workers were engaged in a BASIC interpreter for the same. Later, he went to work at MITS with Paul Allen and shortly after, dubbed their partnership as “Micro-soft” in 1975 November. Microsoft became independent from MITS later in 1975 and continued developing computer programming language for multiple systems. At Microsoft, Gates not only supervised the commercial details but wrote codes as well.
Bill Gates in partnership with IBM
When IBM approached Microsoft for making BASIC interpreter for their future sets of personal computers, Gates ultimately agreed with their proposal under the condition that Microsoft would retain the copyright of the computer operating system, in fear that other hardware makers might duplicate the computer system of IBM. IBM approved the condition and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major performer in the international computer industry.
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