Preview

Bill Gates and His Accomplishments

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1436 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Bill Gates and His Accomplishments
Bill Gates: An Important Visionary For Better or Worse by Blake Noonan

Having an imagination is a virtue. Imagining an entirely new way to communicate and interact with others through a machine is amazing in itself. Bill Gates is not only the richest man in the world, but some consider him as the most ingenious too. Others see him as a monopolizing, money hungry nerd. William Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington in 1955. When he was thirteen, he wrote his first software program, which enabled him and his friends to play tic-tac-toe. While Gates was attending Harvard, his best friend Paul Allen showed him the newest electronic hardware system in Popular Electronics magazine. A man named Ed Roberts had invented the first prototype for a personal computer in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was the Altair 8800. Gates and Allen had been waiting for this their entire lives, and wanted to be a part of it. Together, they created a computer language they hoped the Altair could understand. Allen went to Albuquerque to see if their hard work had paid off. Gates worried that companies would not take them seriously and question their credibility. On the other hand, MITS, the company who produced the Altair, was astonished and gave them their own Altair 8800. At the age of nineteen, Gates dropped out of Harvard and co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. Microsoft started in a hotel room in Albuquerque with Gates and Allen as co-founders. They hired a few others, who helped perfect their binary system and get it out on the market. After a year or two of working with this language, they were not making a big profit. They felt that Microsoft needed a change. Gates and Allen moved to Seattle in 1980 and teamed up with Harvard roommate Steve Ballmer. In August of 1980 the three men went to IBM 's corporate office in Miami, Florida to offer them a disc operating system. They convinced IBM that they needed "DOS" to compete with Apple. What IBM didn

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Outliers

    • 1270 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Coming from a wealthy background, Bill Gates went to private school where a portion of the institution's funding went to a new computer terminal. However, Gates did not “learn programming by the laborious computer-card system, like virtually everyone else was doing in the 1960s [,and instead] he got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader” (Gladwell 51). The upper hand that Gates had with this privilege, eventually gave him the chance to work at Information Sciences Inc, ISI. There he spent “1,575 hours of computer time on the ISI mainframe, which averages[d] out to eight hours a day, seven days a week” (Gladwell 52). This ample amount of time to practice and perfect his craft gave him the extra boost to become exceptional at programming leading to the creation of Microsoft.…

    • 1270 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Person of the Decade

    • 1037 Words
    • 4 Pages

    “Bill Gates, in full William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955, Seattle, Washington, U.S.), is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur who co-founded Microsoft Corporation, the world’s largest personal-computer software company. Gates wrote his first software program at the age of 13. In high school he helped form a group of programmers who computerized their school’s payroll system and founded Traf-O-Data, a company that sold traffic-counting systems to local governments. In 1975 Gates, then a sophomore at Harvard University, joined his hometown friend Paul G. Allen to develop software for the first microcomputers. They began by adapting BASIC, a popular programming language used on large computers, for use on microcomputers. With the success of this project, Gates left Harvard during his junior year and, with Allen, formed…

    • 1037 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    “Gates invaded the network and installed a program on the main computer that sent itself to the rest of the network’s computers.” (“Bill Gates.”) Introducing the first virus, the crash that entailed was no small feat. Once it was revealed that Gates was involved in this he faced major repercussion for his actions. Together, these two instances brought major complication for Gates and his family at the time of their occurrence. Nevertheless, they show how even before his junior year in high school, Gates had already established a fundamental understanding of computers and how they communicated with each other. Moving beyond Lakeside High School, Gates attended Harvard University in 1973. Focusing on his studies for nearly three semesters, he quickly shifted this spotlight to home computing and software integration. Inspired by recent news of popular home computer the Altair 8800, “Gates knew where he wanted to be: at the forefront of computer software design.” (“Bill Gates.”) Pursuing these goals only aided in heightening Gates and Allen's sense and proficiency in the broken programing languages of the late 70s as well as granting the two a wider perspective in the emerging tech industry. As established, both Gates and Allen…

    • 1755 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Without a society integrated with technology, communication and productivity would be hindered not only on a person level, but a global and commercial scale. Bill Gates, an American entrepreneur, found success from being the co-founder of Microsoft and designing and developing software for the Personal Computer (How to be a Billionaire). William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. He was the second child and only son of William Henry Gates Jr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His father, being a Seattle attorney and his mother being a schoolteacher helped him achieve his brilliant state. In middle school, Gates developed an interest in computer science, a path which allowed him to explicate the smarts he obtained in the form of technology. Although many may argue that such technology is forcing us to take a step backwards in our social interactions, Bill Gates, the 20th century ambitious revolutionist, contrived the software that aided society to prosper.…

    • 945 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Bill Gates and Thomas Edison both relate on an invention that changed mankind worldwide, making life easier for people. Their inventions took time, but where similar in the creative process and developed throughout the years. Bill Gates idea of Microsoft is difficult to critique and the creating process as well. Bill Gates is a genius and arguing on how his idea could have gone different is difficult to find. Thomas Edison invention of the light bulb is difficult to critique on how the process could have been different. Both inventions were life-changing and led to other inventions out of…

    • 846 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Bill Gates

    • 1694 Words
    • 7 Pages

    William Henry (Bill) Gates III was born on October, 28th, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. His family was from upper middle-class. His father, William Henry Gates, Sr., is a retired lawyer. Mother of Bill Gates, Mary Maxwell, graduated from University of Washington. She was a teacher, businessperson, and civil activist. Bill Gates was growing in very close and warm family atmosphere with two sisters: Kristianne and Libby. The closest relationship of Bill was with his mother. He liked to play athletic games and logic games, as monopoly, with family and showed good competitive skills since childhood.…

    • 1694 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Bill Gates Is a Hero

    • 1384 Words
    • 6 Pages

    To become one of the most influential people in the world, Gates had to have the work ethic and determination to get there. With great work ethic he started, as a child, with debugging computers for local people in his town (“Gates, William Henry, III” 1). This also started his love for computers, and as he researched and started figuring computers out he became more skillful with them. After he started debugging computers, he began to dabble in writing software programs, his first program that he and his friends made was a computerized payroll system for his high school (“Gates, Bill” 1). He and his friends then proceeded to make more complicated programs, such as Traf-O-Data, which was a traffic counting program that Gates and his partner Paul Allen sold to the city they lived in for $20,000 when they were just fifteen years old (“William H. Gates” 1).…

    • 1384 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Famous Thinkers

    • 1301 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In 1955 a young entrepreneur and a multi-billionaire contributor named, Bill Gates was born. Many should be aware of the name Bill Gates; it is hard not to be familiar with the richest self-made man in America. The influences to the world prepared by Bill are countless, but most important and certainly his best influence is his company Microsoft. American computer entrepreneur, in 1975 he co-founded Microsoft, a private company for the manufacture and sale of computer software (Oxford University Press 2004).…

    • 1301 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington October 28, 1955. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father was a Lawyer. Gates had two sisters, and was spoiled as a child in a wealthy household. He was sent to a school by the name of Lakeside, here is where he began to show his interest in computer technology. At the age of thirteen, Gates violated school rules by creating his first software, a tic-tac-toe game, during “computer time” in class. In his attendance at lakeside, he built up a bad reputation by disregarding the rules and although he was socially awkward, and extremely opinionated, he managed to find a friend who shared the same interests in computer technology, Paul Allen. Allen became great friends with Gates, and in 1971 he even co-created their first company called TRAF-O-DATA. Their Company “specialized in monitoring and analyzing traffic statistics in cities and countries”(Berbagi). Their company did well and made $20,00 the first year, but then quickly fell due to customers discovering his age of 17. Gates soon graduated from Lakeside in 1973, with a surplus of knowledge. It is rumored that he scored a 1590 out of 1600 points on his SAT (Leaders of the information age). In later months, Bill Gates attended Harvard University with Allen, and began a programming language called BASIC. However, this…

    • 1182 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Alan Turing had to convince his government that his idea would work, and the way he…

    • 592 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ted Talk About Grit

    • 1170 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Gates would work day and night, seven days a week. There were times he didn’t even shower. He would personally read every line of code in each product he sold. Gates trusted the process during this whole time. As the story goes, Microsoft became the multi-billion dollar company it is today.…

    • 1170 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    They both established and co-founded their companies along with another person (co-founder). Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen who dropped out of Washington State University to follow his and Bill Gates dream of writing software…

    • 735 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    One of his first machines was the Automatic Computing Machine (ACE). He was enlisted to the National Physical Laboratory in London to design and progress the electric computer . “It was the first relatively complete specification of an electric stored-program general-purpose digital computer” The machine had less memory than Alan had originally intended . Although they were close, the NPL lost the race to build the world’s first working digital computer that also had a stored program .…

    • 2244 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    When Gates was in College Gates and Paul Hillen Cofounded Microsoft in 1975, Gates hold the position of chairman CEO and chief of the software.…

    • 367 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Everyone in the world wants a computer that is compatible with worldwide technology. Bill Gates is a gigantic leader in that innovative technology field. In spite of being a Harvard drop out, Mr. Gates transformed the revolution of technology into an industry of computer software that is unmatched in recent history.…

    • 4489 Words
    • 18 Pages
    Powerful Essays