Their Contributions to Information Technology and the IT Industry
Nowadays, information technology is playing a significant role in human’s life. Actually, it has only been developing for several decades. In fact, there are two key men who contribute greatly for this process. They are Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee. This essay will explain their contribution to IT and its industry and discuss it in several aspects.
There remain several differences between the computer before early 1970s and they are now. At that time, it is very huge and expensive. In January 1975, Popular Electronics magazine announced that the first microcomputer of the world which called Altair 800 had appeared. It is a real revolution as this first personal computer came out. However, the Altair was unable to deal with issues because no one can design any software to be installed on it. After receiving this news, Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen were inspired to try to create a special BASIC language for Altair. Therefore, they contacted the boss of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), which create the microcomputer, told him about this, and the boss required them to demonstrate. BASIC, as its name means, was one of the most simple but high-level programming language to write and design software. Gates and Allen had done research on it since high school.
Since they did not have a microcomputer, they analyzed the Intel 8080 chip totally, which is the tiny data processor in the computer, and then the program could be written by Gates. At the same time, Allen looked for another computer to substitute the Altair and test their BASIC language. Finally, they succeed and MITS agreed to distribute it and market it as Altair BASIC. Additionally, Allen obtained the opportunity to work for
MITS as a software director, while Gates dropped from Harvard in his junior year. On
April 4, 1975 they officially formed the Microsoft,