Bill Gates spent his childhood in Seattle, Washington, USA. Seattle is the base of American Boeing Company. Nearly half of the employees in this city work in this company, so people also call Seattle Boeing City. It ranks alongside San Francisco and Los Angeles as one of the three major gateways on the west coast of the United States.
Gates, a 7-year-old boy with sandy hair, likes to read the world encyclopedia repeatedly. He often reads word by word for hours, which is almost his weight 1/3. He is often lost in thought. Somehow, he seems to feel strongly that what a magical and magical world it is in small words and huge books! Symbols of words can actually record and spread interesting things of predecessors and people all over the world. He thought, the history of mankind will be longer and longer, so the encyclopedia in the future will be bigger and heavier! Is there any good way to make the magic box so big and all-encompassing, and how convenient it is to put a big encyclopedia in it? This wonderful spark of thought was later realized for him, and it was smaller than a cigarette box, just a small chip.
Gates is reading more and more books and thinking more and more questions. Once he suddenly said to his fourth-grade classmate Carl Edmund: It is better to be an oak tree standing on a bald mountain than to be a grass in the lawn. Because the grass is the same and has no personality, while the oak tree is tall and straight, with its head held high in the sky. He keeps a diary and writes down his thoughts at any time. When he was young, he was often as thoughtful as an adult. He realized a long time ago that human life is hard-won, and he should cherish this precious opportunity when he is not alive. He wrote in his diary: Life is a grand date. For a person, the most important thing in life is to abide by the highest commitment put forward by human accumulated rationality ... so what is the commitment? Is to do something earth-shattering In another diary, he wrote: Perhaps, human life is a burning fire, and what one can do is to try his best to save something from this fire. This? The consciousness of catching up with life is rare among children of the same age.
Gates' promise is to catch up with what he wants to save in life, which is reflected in his daily actions. That is, he will devote all his efforts and spend all his time to finish any homework at school and assigned by the teacher, whether it is playing musical instruments, writing compositions or sports competitions.
The teacher assigned his fourth-grade students a composition about the special functions of the human body, which required four or five pages. As a result, Gates wrote more than 30 pages in one breath using the encyclopedia in his father's study and other books on medicine, physiology and psychology. On another occasion, the teacher assigned students to write a story of no more than 20 pages. Gates tried hard to extrapolate and wrote a magical and tortuous story of 100 page, which surprised teachers and classmates! People say that no matter what Gates does, he always likes to climb high and look far. If he doesn't talk, he will get ahead, otherwise he will not be satisfied.
Gates also showed this spirit in sports and social activities. During the summer vacation, there was an 80-kilometer March by Boy Scouts, which lasted for a week. Obviously, the new boots don't suit him very well. Walking on foot every day 13 kilometers, climbing mountains and mountains, suffered a lot. On the first night, his heel was worn out and many blisters appeared on his toes. He gritted his teeth and walked on. The next night, his feet were very red and swollen and his cracked skin was bleeding. His companions advised him to stop, but he shook his head, just asked the team doctor for some cotton wool and gauze to wrap it up, and asked for some painkillers to eat, and continued on his way. In this way, he insisted on a checkpoint on the road. When the leader found that his foot was seriously inflamed, he ordered medical treatment and stopped marching. Gates' mother came from Seattle. When she saw his feet festering, she cried sadly, complaining why her son didn't stop the parade earlier. Gates simply said? Unfortunately, I didn't reach my destination this time.
From 65438 to 0969, the Seattle Lakeside Middle School where Gates was located was the first school in the United States to offer computer courses. At that time, there was no PC, and the school only had one terminal, which was bought by raising a lot of money from the society and parents. The terminal is connected to a small electronic computer PDP- 10 owned by other units. It can only be used for a short time every day, and the cost per hour is also high. Like discovering the New World, Gates got into the computer room to operate the terminal whenever he had time, almost to the point of forgetting to eat and sleep. /kloc-at the age of 0/3, he independently wrote the first computer program, which can play the game of soft landing of the moon on the computer screen. July 20th this year happened to be the day when American astronauts Ames Lang and Aldrin took the lunar module, which represented the first time that humans set foot on the surface of the moon. Gates thought, I can't go to the moon by spaceship, so let me use the computer to realize my dream of going to the moon!
But it didn't last long. After only half a year, Hubin Middle School can no longer afford to pay the rent of the expensive PDP- 10 minicomputer. This incident made Gates feel as painful as losing the opportunity to go to school, because he was already fascinated by computers. So he and his classmates ran around and finally found an opportunity to help a computer company called CCC catch bugs and pay their computer operating expenses with the reward of pest control. What is a Bug? This is what people in the computer industry call software errors, which is synonymous with annoying bugs. Because once you have this bug, it will cause the computer to export the wrong result or crash. The Mariner rocket launched by the United States to Venus and the Leona rocket launched by France failed to launch because of a computer software bug, and lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Gates excitedly made an appointment with several computer enthusiasts among his classmates. At about 6 o'clock every night, CCC employees come to work there by bike after work. There are many teleprinting terminals and all kinds of computer software to learn, which is really like a duck to water. Gates was so obsessed with computer software that he stayed there almost all night, just as he was determined to make a name for himself when he was in elementary school. Every night, he writes down a computer bug that he and his partners found in the record book of CCC company. Through this period of catching bugs, Gates learned a lot of computer software and hardware knowledge and skills that books and schools could not learn, which laid a solid foundation for future research and development.
1970, when Gates 15 years old, his computer talent was well known. A company named Information Science approached Gates, hoping to provide computer time using PDP- 10 in exchange for the software technology of Gates and his classmate Paul. Because minors can't be paid according to American law, the company decided to pay them computer time worth 1 10,000 dollars and asked them to design salary management software for the company. This gave them enough computer time for a school year, and they couldn't help but be overjoyed. 197 1, Hubin Middle School asked Gates to help the school design a set of computer course scheduling software. At that time, the timetable was completely manual. Due to the large number of students and the complexity and diversity of courses, people often arrange courses unevenly, which leads to overcrowding of some courses. Gates successfully completed this arduous task, extending his precious time in using the computer.
1973, TRW company, an American defense engineering contractor, wants to develop a computer monitoring system for reservoir management, but it can't eliminate all kinds of computer bugs, and the progress is slow, so it will be punished for breach of contract. At this critical moment, TRW Company learned about Gates and Paul, two little computer geniuses, and asked them for help. The two boys agreed happily. This is a very professional and difficult job, and according to the regulations, middle school students can only get the low salary of work-study students. But Gates doesn't care. His main purpose is to improve and exercise his software design ability through this kind of work. Hubin Middle School is also very open-minded, allowing senior students to practice and work in enterprises after completing the prescribed courses. Thanks to the joining of Gates and Paul, TRW finally completed the project on time and avoided huge fines. Gates and Paul got specific guidance from a computer expert in the company, which improved their software skills.
After Gates went to college, he set up a company to develop computers, and then he crossed the peak of many difficulties, making his Microsoft company develop many new models of computer software and hardware that lead the new trend in the world, and the products are popular all over the world. That's another story!