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 one of the richest men on earth.

1.His Childhood

William Henry Gates III. is the soll of William Henry Gates II., a well-known lawyer in Seattle and Mary Gates. 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 Jot of people say, Bill could be successful in every profession he wanted to, but he discovered his passion for computers 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 onee of his teachers, that he is going to be a millionaire onee day. He 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 Rasic for the 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 horne 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 ofthe year Microsoft had 125 employees. With the followingversionsMS-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 startedprogramming Windows, which was to become the most successful product ever produced.

With Windows (including also Windows NT and Windows 95) Microsoft could strengthen its position in themarket. ~hen Microsoft was jloated on the stock market in 1986,Bill Gates became ovemight one of the, richest men on earth. 2200 other employees of Microsoft are now in 1995 Dollar Multimillionaires.

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 marveling about his abilities. Charles Simonyi, a leading programmer of Microsort, said once: ' A lot of people can do solllething very weIl, but Bill is different. He can do a lot ofthings 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 solllething on the whole, but he is also keen on sniall details. Olle reason for his success is, that he never stops before solllething is finished, he always tries again and again.' ,

Bill Gates has been married for two years now. 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. W hell you ask him why, he orten says, 'I am worklng for Microsort, 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 Microsort can provide me with the world's bestjob.

But it would be wrong to say, that Bill Gates is just interested in computers. Certainly they are the main part ofhis (business) life, but for example he has been fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci since he was ten years old. In myopinion 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.

4.His visions and dreams

Bill Gates is famous for his visions about the future of information and computers.

He says he wants that there is a computer in every horne and on every desk. In 1990 he dreamed of a global network of computers. He called that 'Information at you fingertips.' Microsoft invests every year 100 million Dollars into the Information Highway. ,

Bill Gates thinksthat the Information Highway is also going to change our daily lives. At the moment he is building his new house at the seaside of Lake Washington. This house is simply said a big computer. But he thinks it isjust a question oftime, when nearly everybody who wants will be able to have a high-tech house.

The Information Highway will change a lot, for example the economy, the learningor entertainment and Microsoft and Bill Gates will certainly participate.

The biographist James Wallace goes even further. He says Gates will be the most powerful man in the history of the 20th century .He can determine in some grad, how our life will be in the future, how we will communicate and how we are going to study:

I hope younowhave an appreciatioQ of the dynamic role Bill Gates and his company will play in the development of our information society .

Vocabulan:

ability -Fähigkeit

chairman -Vorsitzender ernployee -Angestellter hot-ternpered -jähzornig monopoly -Monopol

passion -Leidenschaft

private wealth -Privatvermögen Profit -Gewinn Sa:les -Umsatz stock -Aktie

to consider -betrachten

to ernulate -ernulieren (is similar to simulate)

to float on the stock market -Aktien an der Börse auschütten to underestimmate -unterschätzen visionary -Visionär

Computer terms:

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

Assembler -low-Ievel programming language, used t? 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, nicki1ame 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 -MicrosoftDisk Operating System

Windows, Windows 95, Windows NT -graphical interface operatingsystem developed by Microsoft Word -word processor from Microsoft