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Goyal
Period
6
12/15/2010
Harvard
Dropout
Creates
World’s
Leading
Operating
System
Born to a wealthy family on October 28th, 1955 in Seattle, Washington,
William Henry Gates III, also known as Bill Gates, led his life by contributing greatly
to the science of computers and is one of the world’s richest philanthropists. As a
young child, William was fascinated by anything that had to do with computers and
the software they came with. Starting at the ripe age of 13, Bill took matters into his
own hands by creating his own software during the free time his school provided. It
was then when he created his first software program, which played tic-‐tac-‐toe.
Although Seattle‘s Lakeside School provided Bill with the materials to
program and develop a love for the subject, the real milestone in Bill’s life was when
he met Paul Allen. Paul was another student attending the school who shared the
same interests as Bill in computer programming. Together, their partnership
brought their computer programming skills to great heights. For example, they
worked at Computer Center Corporation (CCC), and soon after, they opened their
first company, Traf-‐O-‐Data in the fall of 1971. Traf-‐O-‐Data helped monitor and
analyze traffic statics in cities, and at 16 years old, it was the first time Bill and Paul
Another major milestone in Bill and Allen’s partnership was the creation of
the first versatile software program, Altair BASIC. Altair BASIC was an interpreter
for the BASIC programming language that ran on MITS Altair 8800. It was the start
Redmond, Washington with Paul. Their plan was to create software for the brand
allowing the user to use his/her mouse to simply point and click to open an
application/file. Before MS-‐DOS, the user had to know the location of the
application AND the command to open it. MS-‐DOS was the main operating system
for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the lower to middle
1990s, when it was slowly outdated by operating systems that offered graphical
user interfaces (GUI). Although MS-‐DOS was slowly outdated, I strongly believe it
was Bill’s most significant contribution to computer science and was a foundation to
On New Years Day, 1994, Bill married Melinda French, a Microsoft manager,
on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Together, they established the Bill & Melinda Gates
foundation, which focuses on improving health care and education for children
around the world. The foundation is one of the world’s largest charities –
contributing over $4 billion since its start in 1996. Some of the many contributions
of this foundation include: $50 million to help the World Organization’s effort to
wipe out polio, $25 million to Harvard University to study AIDS prevention in Africa,
and a $20 million 5-‐year grant to Johns Hopkins University to study whether or not
inexpensive vitamin and mineral pills can save lives of malnourished people.
Throughout Bill Gates’ career, he encountered many hardships and solved
many
problems
and
overall,
made
it
much
easier
for
people
to
use
personal
Ankit
Goyal
Period
6
12/15/2010
computers.
For
example,
Microsoft
allows
users
to
bypass
all
the
technical
commands when opening a file by simply pointing to the file and clicking to open it.
Although Bill Gates is 55 years old, he is still continuing to benefit the world by his
many philanthropic contributions and his large contributions to the field of
computer science.
Bibliography