Bill? Bill Gates, full name William? Henry. Gates III, Bill or Gates for short. 1955/kloc-0 was born in Seattle, Washington, USA on October 28th. He is an entrepreneur, software engineer, philanthropist and founder of Microsoft Corporation. Former chairman, CEO and chief software designer of Microsoft.
Bill? Gates 13 years old [1] started computer programming, 18 years old was admitted to Harvard University, dropped out of Harvard one year later and joined his good friend Paul? Allen co-founded Microsoft [2], and Bill Gates served as the chairman, CEO and chief software designer of Microsoft.
Bill? From 1995 to 2007, Gates became the richest man in the world for 13 years in a row [3] and the richest man in the United States for 20 years in a row [4].
In 2000, Bill? Gates founded Bill and Melinda? Gates Foundation, in 2008, Bill Gates announced that he would donate 58 billion dollars of his personal property to charitable foundations [5], 20 14, Bill? Gates resigned as chairman and repelled Carlos? Slim returns to the richest man in the world. [7]
On September 29, 20 14, local time in the United States, Forbes released the list of the 400 richest people in the United States, showing that Microsoft co-founder Bill? Gates is the richest man in the United States for 2 1 year with a wealth of 8 1 billion dollars.
1. A genius boy obsessed with computers
Gates was born for computers, and he also brought computers into a beautiful new world?
Bill? Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, and grew up in a rich family. His father William? Gates William. Gates is an outstanding lawyer. His mother is a member of the Board of Directors of Washington University and a director of Firenstedbank, the First Interstate Bank. In order to give his children a good education, Gates' parents sent him to Lakeside, a private high school in Seattle, where he was strictly disciplined. It was here that Gates discovered the center of his career-computer, and met his future work partner Paul? Allen, Paul Allen.
Gates became fascinated with computers after he entered Lakeside Middle School. Since then, he has no intention of taking other classes and spent every day in the computing center. Since the eighth grade, Gates has used his spare time to help people design simple computer programs and earn pocket money with his classmates. According to Gates himself, I wrote my first software program when I was thirteen years old, and I used it to play TIC-tac-toe. The computer I was using was big, heavy, slow and quiet? Disobedient? . ? Paul, a good friend of Gates? Allen (who later founded Microsoft with Gates) recalled? At that time, we often worked until midnight, and we loved working on computer software. At that time, we really had a good time. ?
Gates said: At that time, Paul often pulled me out of the trash can, but I continued to lie there and refused to get up, because there I found some notes or programmers' notes with coffee grounds on them, and then we studied the operating system together against these valuable materials. ?
When Gates was in the ninth grade, engineers of TRW Company met with problems when building the northwest transmission network, and they were at a loss. At this time, they found a problem report from the calculation center of Hubin Middle School, and called the two "error detection masters" (Gates and Allen) who made this report on the spot, hoping that they could help to eliminate the problem. But they never thought that these two? Master? In fact, they are only students in grade 9 10!
2. Difficult to start a business
1In the summer of 973, Gates entered the first year of Harvard University as a national gifted student and lived on the same floor as SteveBallmer, the current president of Microsoft.
At Harvard, he still couldn't resist the temptation of computers, so he often skipped classes and stayed in the computer room for a few days, writing programs and playing games all night.
1In the winter of 975, Gates and Paul got inspiration from the Altair machine of MITS, saw business opportunities and the future development direction of computers, so they called Roberts, the founder of MITS, and said that they could provide a basic compiler for Altair. Roberts said at the time:? I get many letters and phone calls every day. I told them that whoever finished the project first would get the job. ? So Gates and Paul returned to Harvard. From January to March, they stayed in Gates' dormitory for eight weeks, writing and debugging programs day and night. They hardly remember the lights in the dormitory.
When did it pass? Finally, they succeeded. Two months of all-night efforts and wisdom have produced the BASIC programming language of ——MITSAltair, the world's first microcomputer, and MITS is very satisfied with it.
Three months later, Gates was sensitive to the fact that computers were developing so fast that he might lose a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity after graduating from college, so he dropped out of Harvard in the third year. They are convinced that personal computers will be a very valuable tool for every office desktop system and every family, and under the guidance of this belief, they began to develop software for personal computers.
Soon, Gates and Allen moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Alta was located, and formally founded Microsoft. Gates was only 19 years old. 1977, Apple, Commodore and RadioShack entered the personal computer market, and Microsoft provided BASIC to most early personal computers. BASIC was the most important software element at that time. According to Gates' own description:? In the first three years of Microsoft's establishment, most other professionals devoted themselves to technical work, while I was in charge of sales, finance and marketing plans. ? Every time I sell BASIC to a company, I gain more confidence. ? In this way, Microsoft BASIC has quickly become the software standard of the computer industry under the impetus of low-cost authorization and winning by quantity. At that time, almost every PC manufacturer would use software authorized by Microsoft. 1979, Gates moved the company to Seattle and changed its name from? Microsoft? Change to? Microsoft? .
At the beginning of the company, energetic Gates and Paul didn't know what fatigue was. They rented an office in a dusty motel and started a difficult entrepreneurial journey. They are crowded in that messy and noisy little space, writing programs day and night, eating a pizza to satisfy their hunger when they are hungry, and going out to see a movie or driving around to solve their difficulties when they are really tired?
Just as they were tirelessly marching towards their dream computer kingdom, Microsoft was involved in a disastrous lawsuit?
At that time, the situation of software piracy was particularly serious, which greatly damaged the interests of Gates. Gates thought Roberts should be responsible for the piracy of the BASIC compiler in the market, so he took it back and sold it to Perterc, but before that, he had signed an agreement with Roberts, allowing MITS to use and transfer the BASIC program and source code within ten years.
Soon, MITS put Microsoft in the dock of the court. Gates was at a loss because of the high legal fees. At the same time, Perterc refused to pay copyright fees to Microsoft. The court arbitration procedure is as slow as a snail. The decrease in income and huge expenses sent Microsoft to the brink of bankruptcy, and Gates and Paul could hardly stand it. Gates still remembers the experience clearly. They wanted to starve us to death, and we couldn't even afford the lawyer's fee, so when they were interested in making peace with us, we almost gave in. Things got so bad that it took the arbitrator nine months to make a damn ruling.