William Gates

Anybody can be a hero. All you need is a hero attitude (not underwear over your pants) or a “nice guy” way of being. Now, to be called a hero is a little harder. Let’s be serious, you need to be recognized by the masses for doing something above and beyond what you need to. Bill Gates is one person that has achieved that. Both in business and in charity.

To me, Bill Gates is a hero because he does great and amazing things for people who really need it. He donates more money a year than most people do in a lifetime. When I hear his name I think “Hey, that’s a really nice guy who got famous by being a winner with a really great attitude!” And that is what Bill Gates really is.

On October 28, 1955, shortly after 9:00 p.m., William Henry Gates III was born. He was born into a family that had a rich history of success. He had many relatives that had helped the community and he started very early in his life being a winner. He had the ambition and intelligence to get wherever he wanted. He was a great student in math and science. His greatness drove his parents to enroll him in a private school called Lakeside. That was where he was first introduced to computers.

In the spring of 1968, his prep school bought their first computer with a whopping amount of money that the school had raised through a fund-raiser. The school had no idea that this machine would change the future of a handful of students. 1968 was the year the school got the computer, and it was also the year Bill Gates wrote his first computer program. Bill and a man named Paul Allen became great friends.

Later, while in Harvard with the intentions of becoming a lawyer, Gates decided to devote all his time to computer software. His friend Paul Allen showed him a magazine for a computer that was missing one thing: software. They contacted MITS and got a contract creating software. All their clients seemed to go bankrupt but finally they got a good client called IBM and that made the money start rolling in because of licensing fees.

By the late 1980’s, Gates and Allen were producing programs like Microsoft Word and Excel, and when the company went public in 1986, Gates became a 31-year old billionaire. With all his work and little to show for it other than money, Gates built a 40,000 square foot house on Lake Washington in 1994 and married a marketing executive at his company named Melinda French. Upon completing the creation of the Gates Charitable organisation, Bill Gates gives as much money to charity a day as a small country makes in yearly income. He also has the record for the largest single donation ever made by a living individual- $6 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates charitable organisation. With a fortune of $54 billion dollars, Gates was named richest in Forbes magazine’s top 400 wealthiest Americans, with Paul Allen being third on the list. Gates has three children named Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe. He enjoys reading, playing golf and bridge, and biotechnology. (Cited from: http://www.myhero.com/myhero/hero.asp?hero=gates_fredericksburg_04)