Bill Gates

Bill Gates http://joschwartz.com/portraits/images/Gates_Bill_01.jpg

Bill Gates is a great man who has soared to great heights in life. He was born in Seattle in 1955; he was the son of a teacher and a lawyer. As a young child he went to The View Ridge School he later went to Laurelhurst Elementary. At a young age his parents noticed that he was brilliant. They thought that they had to give him only the best education and decided to send him to Lakeside School, a prestigious and expensive junior high & high school in the Seattle area, this is where his interest in computers began.

When Bill was thirteen he had his first experience with a computer. His school had bought time with a computer at a nearby company; Bill who was excellent at math was instantly interested and intrigued with computers. He and some of his friends started skipping school just to use nearby computers.

This new interest of Bill’s gave him and his friends the idea to start their own company that worked with computers. At age fourteen Bill founded Traf-o-Data a company that produced devices that allowed drivers to see traffic around them. Traf-o-Data, regardless of its success (Bill was making $20,000 a year) was shut down because people were upset that the company was being run by a few fourteen-year-olds in a basement.

After this first business venture Gates was recognized by several computer companies, one company even offered him a position as a computer programmer at age seventeen. After Lakeside heard about the job offer they recognized Bill’s potential in computers and allowed him to skip his senior year to work the computer-programming job. After high school he went off to Harvard University in Boston where his career would begin.

Strange depicton of Bill http://www.poster.net/gates-bill/gates-bill-andy-warhol-version-4000678.jpg

When at Harvard Bill reunited with an old friend Paul Allen who had also been interested in computers in high school. He and Allen heard that one of the main computer manufacturing companies of the time MITS was looking for a software that would change the way people would look at computers. Gates and Allen soon called the CEO of the company and said that they had developed software that would do just that, they were of course…lying. Nevertheless the CEO said to meet him with the software at the company’s HQ in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Gates and Allen spent days upon days trying to create a software that would work but they eventually came up with it, but they eventually created the program that allows users to operate the computer by clicking on onscreen icons rather than typing in the file then the interaction. MITS thought it was ingenious and asked for more ideas. Gates then dropped out of college and moved to New Mexico, he never graduated.

After working for a few years Gates and Allen founded the Microsoft Company which made Bill one of the most successful people in history. At age 31 in the early eighties Bill became the youngest billionaire ever. Microsoft’s success flew ever onward and Gates became ever richer. In the late nineties Bill and his wife Melinda founded the “Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation” a wonderfully charitable organization. Bill Gates is still extremely successful Microsoft is still flourishing and Bill Gates has the title of “Richest man in the World” and he may carry it to his grave. Bill Gates is a huge inspiration to may people, me included. I’m really interested in computers and love Microsoft’s technology. I think Bill Gates is an extremely important person to the world.