Bill Gates

Who is Bill Gates and what is so special about him?

Bill Gates is chairman and chairman executive officer of Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world. He owns approximately 30% of the company's stock and he is now the richest men on earth.

1.His Childhood

William Henry Gates III., who has two sisters, is the son of William Henry Gates II., a well-known lawyer in Seattle, and Mary Gates, a schoolteacher and chairwoman of United Way International. He was born on the 28th of October 1955 in Seattle.

He visited the Sunday school and was a very good student. Bill was very good at science, especially maths and interested in biographies about famous people.

Bill Gates has an amazing memory. In high school he read through a monologue once and he knew it by heart. A lot of people say, Bill could be successful in every profession he wanted to, but he discovered his passion for computers and began programming computers at age 13 at Lakeside School, a private school in Seattle.  Together with his friend Paul Allen he spent hours sitting in front of the computer. At night they often went to school to do a bit of computing. Once Bill told one of his teachers, that he is going to be a millionaire one day. He didn't  underestimated himself. At the age of 16, he sold his first software, which regulated the traffic lights in Seattle. When he had finished Lakeside School he went to Harvard and started studying law.

In 1975 a company called MITS produced a microcomputer called Altair 8800. Paul and Bill were fascinated by it. They got the technical manual for it and emulated the Altair 8800 on Harvard' s university computer and some months later they contacted MITS, to teIl them, that they have a version of Basic for their computer. Bill Gates and Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in order to introduce Basic to MITS. In this city they founded Microsoft in 1975.

2.Microsoft

First Microsoft consisted just of two fanatic programmers, namly Paul Allen and Bill Gates, and they just made programming languages. Paul Allen did the Assembler programming and Bill made the actual program. When MITS had bought Basic, Microsoft began to grow rapidly.

In 1980, when Bill Gates was just 25 years old, Microsoft came in contact with IBM. This company dominated the market for computers and wanted now to make a home PC and therefore they needed an operating system. Microsoft got instructions from IBM to start developing MS-DOS.

MS-DOS 1,0 was published in August 1981. By the end of  the year Microsoft had 125 employees. With the following versions MS-DOS became more and more important, which gave Microsoft a lot of control over the market.

But the next step followed quickly. Microsoft published applications like Word or Excel and was very successful. But Bill Gates realized, that the future of computers are graphical interfaces and Microsoft started programming Windows, which was to become the most successful product ever produced.

With Windows (including also Windows NT and Windows 95/98/Me) Microsoft could strengthen its position in the market. When Microsoft was floated on the stock market in 1986, Bill Gates became overnight one of the, richest men on earth. 2200 other employees of Microsoft were then in 1995 Multimillionaires.

3. Personality

Bill Gates is indeed a very interesting person. It is not easy to describe him and his personality , because so many factors have to be considered. The descriptions of Bill Gates are different. His opponents say he is hot-tempered and a tyrant, he tries to build up a monopoly and wants to rule the world.

On the other hand lots of people are marvelling about his abilities. Charles Simonyi, a leading programmer of Microsoft, said once: ' A lot of people can do something very weIl, but Bill is different. He can do a lot of things very weIl, he can program, he has creativity, he is a very good salesman, he knows a lot about finance and law. '

Another programmer said: 'Bill has the ability to look at something on the whole, but he is also keen on small details. The reason for his success is, that he never stops before something is finished, he always tries again and again.'

Gates married on Jan. 1, 1994  Melinda French Gates. The couple has two children: a daughter, Jennifer Katharine Gates, born in 1996; and a son, Rory John Gates, born in 1999.

He got to know his wife the first time in the company's E-Mail system. He is certainly very involved in his job, he hardly ever goes on vacation. Will you ask him why, he often says, 'I am working for Microsoft, because I can work with intelligent people and I can try to solve problems. I am fascinated by computers and you know there is nothing that money can do for me, but Microsoft can provide me with the world's best job."

But it would be wrong to say, that Bill Gates is just interested in computers. Certainly they are the main part of his (business) life, but for example he has been fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci since he was ten years old. We think Bill Gates is a very interesting person, not just because of his success, also because of his thought, his visions. He combines a programmer, a businessman and a visionary and this is why he is so successful.

Computer terms:

-Altair 8800 - one of the first microcomputers, which had no keyboard

-Assembler - low-Ievel programming language, used to program for example cores of operating systems ,

-BASIC -a programming language (standing for Beginner All Purpose Symbolic IIW:ruction Code)

-IBM -International Business Machines Corporation

-Big Blue Excel -spreadsheet calculation programm from Microsoft

-Information Highway -expression for a network of fibre-optic cables, much faster than telephone cables

-Microsoft Campus -headquarters of Microsoft Corporation in Redmopd, Washington;

-MITS - a small, New Mexican computer company, which produced the Altair 8800

-MS-DOS -Microsoft Disk Operating System

-Windows, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows me, Windows 2000

-graphical interface - operatingsystem developed by Microsoft

-Word - word processor from Microsoft