FREE ESSAY ON BILL GATES

BILL GATES

Skinny, shy and awkward, teenaged Bill Gates seemed an unlikely successor to his
overachieving parents. His father, powerfully built and 6'6'' tall, was a prominent
Seattle attorney, and his mother served on charitable boards and ran the United Way.
While he showed enormous talent for math and logic, young Bill, a middle child, was no
one's idea of a natural leader, let alone a future billionaire who would reinvent
American business. 
Born in 1955, Gates attended public elementary school, and enrolled in the private
Lakeside School at age twelve. The following year, Gates wrote his first computer
program, at a time when computers were still room-sized machines run by scientists in
white coats. Soon afterwards, he and his friend Paul Allen wrote a scheduling program for
the school--which coincidentally placed the two in the same classes as the prettiest
girls in school. Still in high school, Gates and Allen founded a company called
Traf-O-Data which analyzed city traffic data. 
Gates set off for Harvard University intending to become a lawyer like his father. Still
shy and awkward, he rarely ventured out to parties unless dragged by his friend Steve
Ballmer, whom he later repaid by naming him president of Microsoft. 
One day in December 1974, Allen, who was working at Honeywell outside of Boston, showed
Gates a Popular Mechanics cover featuring the Altair 8800, a $397 computer from M.I.T.S.
computing that any hobbyist could build. The only thing the computer lacked, besides a
keyboard and monitor, was software. Gates and Allen contacted the head of M.I.T.S. and
said they could provide a version of BASIC for the Altair. 
After a successful demonstration at the company's Albuquerque headquarters, M.I.T.S.
contracted with Gates and Allen for programming languages. The pair moved to New Mexico
and started Micro-soft (they dropped the hypen later). Although the company's first five
clients went bankrupt, the company struggled on, moving to Seattle in 1979. The following
year, IBM asked Gates to provide an operating system for its first personal computer.
Gates purchased a system called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $50,000 from
another company, changed the name to MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM. The IBM PC took the
market by storm when it was introduced in 1981--and licensing fees streamed into
Microsoft, ensuring the company's survival over the next several years. 
Microsoft continued concentrating on the software market, adding consumer applications
like Microsoft Word. In 1986, when the company went public, Gates became a paper
billionaire at the age of thirty-one. The following year, the company introduced its
first version of Windows, and by 1993 was selling a million copies a month. When Windows
95 was introduced in August 1995, 7 million copies were sold in the first six weeks
alone. Microsoft's software became so ubiquitous that the U.S. Justice Department began a
series of long-lasting antitrust investigations against the company, bogging it down in
protracted legal battles. 
In 1995, Gates dramatically changed the direction of the entire company and focused on
the Internet. While some of his efforts, including the much hyped Microsoft Network and
its highly touted Web shows, fizzled, the company quickly gained ground on Netscape with
its popular Internet Explorer browser. 
Meanwhile, Gates built a 40,000-square-foot technological showcase of a home on Lake
Washington. Gates also got married on Jan. 1, 1994, to Melinda French Gates(a marketing
executive at Microsoft). The couple had two children: a daughter, Jennifer Katharine
Gates, born in 1996; and a son, Rory John Gates, born in 1999. 
a marketing executive at Microsoft. They later had two kids: daughter Jennifer born in
1996 and son Rory born in 1999.
Bill and Melinda Gates have endowed a foundation with more than $17 billion to support
philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that
as we move into the 21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available for
all people.To date, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $300
million to organizations working in global health; more than $300 million to improve
learning opportunities, including the Gates Library Initiative to bring computers,
Internet Access and training to public libraries in low-income communities in the United
States and Canada; more than $54 million to community projects in the Pacific Northwest;
and more than $29 million to special projects and annual giving campaigns. 
In addition to his passion for computers, Gates is interested in biotechnology. He sits
on the board of the Icos Corporation and is a shareholder in Darwin Molecular, a
subsidiary of British-based Chiroscience. He also founded Corbis Corporation, which is
developing one of the largest resources of visual information in the world-a
comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections
around the globe. Gates also has invested with cellular telephone pioneer Craig McCaw in
Teledesic, a company that is working on an ambitious plan to launch hundreds of low-orbit
satellites around the globe to provide worldwide two-way broadband telecommunications
service.