“AS WE LOOK AHEAD INTO THE NEXT CENTURY, LEADERS WILL BE THOSE WHO EMPOWER OTHERS.” - BILL GATES
 

Bill Gates is an American entrepreneur, programmer, investor, and philanthropist. He is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president, and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. As of August 2020, Gates had an estimated net worth of US$113.7 billion, making him the second-wealthiest person in the world, behind Bezos.

 

He is one of the best-known entrepreneurs and pioneers of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

 

Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on the 28th October 1955. His father, William H. Gates Sr. and his mother, Mary Maxwell Gates. He has one older sister Kristi and one younger sister Libby.

 

At the age of 13, he enrolled in Lakeside School, a private preparatory school. While at that school, Bill took an interest in programming the General Electric system in BASIC and was excused from classes to pursue his interest.

 

He built his first computer program on the General Electric machine. Gates met Paul Allen at the school and they worked together to find bugs in the PDP-10 system belonging to Computer Center Corporation. Gates, Paul, and two other students wrote a payroll program for Information Sciences in exchange for computer time and royalties. After that it led on to his school becoming fully aware of his programming skills, he created a program to schedule students in classes.

 

At the age of 17, he and Paul started a venture called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on Intel 8008 processors. Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973 and was a National Merit Scholar, scoring 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT. He enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973 where he met Steve Ballmer.

 

Gates did not have a study plan at Harvard but spent a lot of time using the computers. In 1974, he joined Paul Allen at Honeywell. In 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 based on Intel’s 8080 CPU was released. Bill and Paul saw this as an opportunity to start their own software company.

 

In 1975, Gates read an article in the January of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, so Gates contacted MITS, the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. Gates and Allen did not have any written code, they wanted to gauge the interest of MITS. They met with the MITS president and had developed an Altair emulator within a few weeks to demonstrate on a minicomputer and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration was a success which led to a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC.

 

Paul Allen was hired into MITS and Gates took a leave of absence from college to work with Allen in November 1975. They named their partnership Micro-Soft, a year later the hyphen was dropped, and on 26th of November 1976, the trade name Microsoft was registered.

 

IBM approached Microsoft to write a BASIC interpreter for the new IBM PC, Gates referred them to Digital Research as they required an operating system, but the discussions did not go well. IBM representatives spoke with Gates around the discussions and he proposed using 86-DOS owned by SCP, an operating system similar to hardware similar to the PC. Microsoft made a deal with SCP to become the exclusive licensing agent, and later the full owner of 86-DOS. After adapting the operating system for the PC, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC DOS in exchange for a one time fee of $50,000.

 

The sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry. Despite IBM’s name on the operating system, the press quickly identified Microsoft as being highly influential on the new computer. The computer was called by an expert in the industry as the “Gates computer”. The company was restructured on the 25th of June 1981, Gates become the president and board chairman.

 

Microsoft launched its first retail version of Microsoft Windows on 20th November 1985 and struck a deal with IBM to develop a separate operating system called OS/2. IBM and Microsoft developed the first version of the new system successfully, but their partnership deteriorated due to creative differences.

 

Microsoft has been growing ever since. The software and hardware products have been expanding from Windows OS, Microsoft Office Suites, Office 365, Xbox, Bing, Hotmail. The list goes on. and it all began with that first idea, and then they built upon that.

 

Since 1975 Microsoft has had domination over the software market, Windows software is used in most companies. They have consistently kept up with the pace of change and that is why they remain the #1 software company in the world.

 

Lessons to take:

Gates did not build the first OS that IBM used, he bought the licensing rights from SCP and then continued to build upon that to create the company that Microsoft is today.

 

You don’t have to create something new, you can take a product and improve upon it so that it is excellent.

 

Do something that you are passionate about, Bill Gates loves computers. So find your passion and start a venture around that.

 

Believe in yourself!