Games - Bill Gates

Home > Listing Index > Games > Bill Gates

	Games - Bill Gates

William Henry "Bill" Gates III, (born October 28, 1955) is the co-founder, chairman, and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the world's largest software company (as of March 2006). He is also the founder of Corbis, a digital image archiving company. According to Forbes magazine, Gates is the richest person in the world, with a net worth of about US $50 billion, as of March, 2006 Gates commented on the story in a 1994 interview with Playboy: :PLAYBOY: Did you have a million-dollar trust fund while you were at Harvard? :GATES: . . . . My parents are very successful, and I went to the nicest private school in the Seattle area. I was lucky. But I never had any trust funds of any kind, though my dad did pay my tuition at Harvard, which was quite expensive.

A 1993 biography by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews calls the trust fund story one of the "fictions" surrounding Gates' fortune.

Exceptionally intelligent, Gates excelled in elementary school, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. Bill Gates went to Lakeside, Seattle's most exclusive preparatory school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1760). Lakeside rented time on a DEC PDP-10, which Bill was able to use to pursue an interest in computers, a rare opportunity at the time. Gates was a member of the Boy Scouts of America and attained the rank of Life Scout. While in high school, he and Paul Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a company which sold traffic flow data systems to state governments. He also helped to create a payroll system in COBOL, for a company in Portland, Oregon.

According to a press inquiry he scored 1590 on his SATs, which allowed Gates to enroll in Harvard University pursuing a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science in 1973, where he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer. During his second year at Harvard, Gates (along with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff) co-wrote Altair BASIC for the Altair 8800. Gates dropped out of Harvard during his third year to pursue a career in software development. On December 13, 1977, Gates was briefly jailed in Albuquerque for racing his Porsche 911 in the New Mexico desert.

Microsoft

After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others had developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the platform. This was untrue, as Gates and Allen had never used an Altair previously nor developed any code for it. Within a period of eight weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. Allen and Gates flew to MITS to unveil the new BASIC system. The demonstration was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to buy the rights to Allen and Gates's BASIC for the Altair platform. It was at this point that Gates left Harvard along with Allen to found Micro-Soft, which became Microsoft Corporation.

In February 1976, Gates published his often-quoted "Open Letter to Hobbyists". In the letter, Gates claimed that most users were using "stolen" pirated copies of Altair BASIC and that no hobbyist could afford to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment. This letter was unpopular with quite a few programmers, some of whom used the pirated copies of the software. In the ensuing years the letter gained significant support from Gates' business partners and allies which gave rise to a movement that led to closed-source becoming the dominant model of software production.

Despite Microsoft's reliance on closed source, Gates has said that he collected discarded program listings at Harvard and learned programming techniques from them. Some people have accused him of being inconsistent in this regard. It has also been pointed out that Microsoft often produces products that incorporate ideas developed outside Microsoft, such as GUIs, the BASIC programming language, or compressed file systems, without paying royalties to the companies that developed them. Some of these matters have gone to court. Apple v. Microsoft concluded that Microsoft had not infringed Apple's intellectual property (partly because Apple had, apparently, licensed parts of the Macintosh user interface to Microsoft); Stac Electronics prevailed in its claim against the DoubleSpace file system. The BASIC question has not been litigated, but the trend in US law is that copyright does not extend to publicly documented programming languages.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Bill Gates ]

Games - Bill Gates

Microsoft

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay