FREE ESSAY ON BILL GATES

BILL GATES

Bill Gates
Ever think about paying cash for your house? How about your car? You would probably
consider it if you carried that kind of cash just in your wallet. Wouldn't you? Just
picture walking down to the nearest bank and saying I'd like to cash my paycheck....Oh
and by the way, I need 100 million in 1000's, and the other 100 million in
100's....thanks! This is probably the norm for a man named William Henry (Bill) Gates
III, who is currently the richest man in the world with over 44 billion dollars in
worth.
Bill Gates was born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. Bill was the only son and
the middle child of William and Mary Gates. He had two sisters, Kristianne and Libby.
Bill nickname growing up was Trey because of the III after his name. Bill's childhood was
somewhat uneventful until his second year at Lakeside Private School, which his father
insisted he attend. The school had contracted with General Electric to time-share a
computer mainframe. The school received an ASR-33 type teletype machine to interact with
General Electric's Mark II time sharing system. This system costed the school about $89 a
month and $8 per hour for time on-line. Gates quickly ran bills in excess of $2000 a
month with his friends. This great amount of time on the computer soon resulted in Bill
surpassing all his teacher's knowledge about computers. With this knowledge Bill and his
friends formed a group called the Lakeside Programming Group or LPG. It was in this group
that Bill Gates would meat future co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen.
Before starting college at Harvard University, Bill was busy figuring the costs of
building a personal computer. He had seen ads in Popular Science Magazine for Intel's
latest processor the 8008 which costed about $860. The computer was not complete before
Bill left for college, but would later occupy a major portion of his time. 
After Bill's freshmen year, he got hired in the summer to work for Information Sciences
Inc. (ISI), where he developed a useful payroll program that also debugged programming
code. Meanwhile in his spare time Bill and Paul continued to work, eventually finishing a
project, which calculated traffic on a given road called Traf-O-Data. This was sold to
the city of Seattle. Soon after this, Bill and Paul would develop a better version of
BASIC for the Intel 8008 processor. Bill wanted Altair, the maker of the processor, to
purchase a license for his BASIC. Since Altair wanted some additional features, Bill then
brought in Ric Weiland who helped in the additional developing of the software. These
changes were ready to run in July of 1975 and Micro-soft was born.
Micro-soft which soon dropped the hyphen from the name, now was receiving contracts from
all the big manufacturers such as Intel, Motorola, Commodore, and General Electric. These
contracts resulted in Bill being to wrapped up in filling the demands that he left
Harvard after finishing 6 semesters. In 1978 Microsoft moved its operations to Redmond,
Washington, where it has constantly expanded its campus.
In 1980, IBM came to Microsoft to find an operating system for their new PC computer
line. The two companies worked together to start the modern PC era that we know today. 
Bill recently married co-worker Melinda French on January 1, 1994 after a long hiatus as
the richest bachelor in the world. Now he is just the richest married man in the world.
Bill knew exactly what to market and how to market it. He realized what computers could
do for society and utilized the idea.
Overall by looking at Bill Gates road to success we can see just how determination, long
hours, and hard, hard work can pay off. Bill Gates is the genius behind perhaps the most
powerful private company in the world, Microsoft. By simply looking at these accurate
statistics from an Internet source of mine we can see just what his genius has earned
him: