Matter
1. BILL GATES 2
1.1. EARLY LIFE 3
1.2. MICROSOFT 4
1.3. PERSONAL LIFE 7
1.4. INFLUENCE AND WEALTH 8
1.5. POPULAR CULTURE 9
1.6. WORKS 10
1.7. REFERENCES 11
1. Bill Gates
Bill Gates in Las Vegas at CES 2006
Born:October 28, 1955 Seattle, Washington
Occupation: Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Spouse:Melinda Gates
Website:microsoft.com/billgates
William Henry 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 April 2006). He is also the founder of Corbis, a digital image archiving company. Gates is the wealthiest individual in the world according to the Forbes 2006 list. When family wealth is considered, he is second behind the Walton family, which The Sunday Times represents by Robson Walton.
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. He is widely respected for his intelligence, foresight, and ambition. He is also widely criticized as having built Microsoft’s business through unfair, illegal, or anticompetitive business practices. Government authorities in several countries have found some of Microsoft’s practices illegal, as in United States v. Microsoft.
Since amassing his fortune, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money (about 51% of his total fortune) to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 2000. He, his wife Melinda and U2’s lead singer Bono were collectively named by Time as the 2005 Persons of the Year. That same year he was given the honor of Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2006, this Foundation has been awarded with the „Premio Príncipe de Asturias en Cooperación Internacional“.
1.1. Early life
Bill Gates’ mug shot from 1977 when he was jailed for a stop-sign violation.
Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was wealthy; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother was the first woman Regent of the University of Washington, and his maternal grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has two younger sisters, Kristanne and Libby.
According to the 1992 biography Hard Drive, Maxwell set up a million-dollar trust fund for Gates the year he was born. Gates commented on this claim in a 1994 interview with Playboy:
PLAYBOY: Did you have a million-dollar trust fund while you were at Harvard?
GATES: Not true. . . . . 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.
Gates excelled in elementary school, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. Bill Gates went to Lakeside School, Seattle’s most exclusive preparatory school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1,760). Lakeside rented time on a DEC PDP-10, which Gates 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, and was able to enroll in Harvard University prelaw program 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.
1.2. Microsoft
In 1984, Bill Gates appeared on the cover
of ‘TIME’ Magazine; he has appeared
seven more times.
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 later 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 many amateur programmers, not just those few using 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.
It has 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.
Gates with Steve Jurvetson of DFJ, Stratton Sclavos of Verisign and