bill gates achievements

1. Inspiring the era of the home computer

During the late 1960s, Bill Gates and his school friend Paul Allen learnt the BASIC programming language whilst studying at Lakeside School in Seattle.

BASIC's popularity stemmed from the fact that it was simple to use for beginners, but had functionality that could be stretched by advanced coders.

While BASIC was designed in 1963, it wasn't until Gates and Allen produced a version for the Altair 8800 that it really started to fly. In 1975, the two sold the code to MITS for $3,000.

BASIC sparked the home computing boom of the 1980s, appearing on the IBM PC, Commodore VIC-20, BBC Micro and the Apple II (to name but a few).

2. Commercialising the operating system

Gates and Allen founded Microsoft in 1976. In 1980, the company inked a landmark deal with IBM to produce an operating system for its up-and-coming personal computer (PC). Microsoft bought 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, a Disk Operating System designed for 8086-based computers.

It used the 86-DOS code as the basis for IBM's first PC OS, which became known as PC-DOS. When clones of IBM's PC started to appear, Microsoft pushed their own version of PC-DOS, MS-DOS, to system builders.

3. Launching Windows 95

When you look back at the career of Bill Gates, it's easy to focus on Microsoft's biggest product – Windows. You can now find versions of Windows on around 90 per cent of the world's computers.

It powers business servers, mobile phones, PDAs, cash machines, retail displays, set-top boxes and old Sega Dreamcast consoles. Windows is everywhere. Windows 95 was arguably the game-changer.

The original Windows 1.0 OS was a effectively a graphical version of MS-DOS, born to compete against the GUI on Apple's 'Lisa'. In comparison, Windows 95 was designed to replace MS-DOS and enabled revolutionary features such as multi-tasking and Plug and Play.

4. Becoming the richest man in the world

Bill Gates became the richest man on the planet at the age of 39. He stayed at number one on the Forbes list of the World's Richest People until 2007.

According to Wikipedia, Bill Gates was worth more than $101 billion in 1999; while Wired reports that, when Microsoft stock hit a high in 1996, Gates was earning $30 million a day.

He's now third on the Forbes list (behind his friend Warren Buffet and Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu) with an estimated fortune of $58 billion.

5. Giving his money away

As Bill Gates clocks out of his day job at Microsoft, the world will arguably be a better place for it. Inspired by the work of John D Rockefeller, Gates and his wife Melinda head up the charitable behemoth that is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2006, Warren Buffet gifted $31 billion to the Foundation, which already had over $30 billion of Gates' own money in its coffers. In 2007 alone, the Foundation spent over $2 billion on global education and health initiatives.

history of microsoft

The History Of Microsoft

Microsoft was formed by a Harvard College Dropout called Bill Gates. Bill Gates was born William Henry Gates III on October 28, 1955. He was born to a family that was successful in business, living a comfortable upper middle class life in Seattle, Washington.

Early in his elementary school days, Bill Gates quickly shot to the head of the class, consistently outscoring his peers in most subjects, but especially math and science. His parents soon enrolled him in Lakeside Prep School, where the atmosphere was intellectual enough to stimulate the young Gates. This move to Lakeside would prove historic, for it was here, in the spring of 1968, that he was introduced to computers.

At that time, computers were still too large and expensive for the school to purchase one of its own. Over the next ten months or so, the school struck agreements with various corporations who allowed the students to use their computers. Bill Gates, his buddy Paul Allen and a handful of others quickly took to computing. In fact, they began to skip classes, opting instead to stay in the computer room and write programs, read computer books and find out exactly how these machines worked. They soon learned to hack the system, and altered and crashed valuable files until they were banned from the computer. Soon, however, Bill and his friends were actually hired by the computer company to find bugs and explore weaknesses in the system, which kept causing the computers to crash. Instead of paying the boys for their time, they were granted something even better--unlimited computer time.

Gates has been quoted as saying that that was the time when he got into computers fulltime. "I mean, then I became hardcore. It was day and night," he said. The boys used their time eating, drinking and breathing computers. They studied manuals, explored the system, and hounded the employees with questions until they had formed a base of knowledge that would eventually lead to the formation of Microsoft.

The computer company that was hiring the group went out of business in 1970, and the boys had to find alternate sources for computer time. They were soon hired by Information Sciences Inc. to write a program for payroll. This time they actually earned money as well as enjoying the unlimited computer time. It was during this time that the group gained notoriety for their skill in computer programming. They were hired or contracted by various organizations to find bugs and fix them. Each job helped Gates and his friends learn their skill and delve ever deeper into the world of programming.

In the fall of 1973, Gates left for Harvard University. He enrolled as a prelaw student, but spent most of his time in the campus computer center, programming away. He stayed in touch with Paul Allen and they continued to talk about future projects and the possibility of one day having their very own business. Allen even moved to Boston to be closer to Gates, so they could continue working on projects. Allen continually urged Gates to quit school and work with him full-time, and Gates was unsure of what he wanted to do. This was soon to change.

One year later, Paul Allen saw the first microcomputer on the cover of a magazine. He bought the magazine and went immediately to show it to Gates. They realized the time was right. The home PC business was about to explode and someone would need to provide software for the machines. By stretching the truth somewhat, Gates arranged for a meeting with the Altair manufacturers. He had called them to let them know he had a program written for them. After the appointment was made, Gates and Allen stayed up for nights, feverishly writing the program he had promised. It worked perfectly at the meeting, and everyone was impressed. They sold the program, and saw that this was something they could do for real. Within a year, Gates had dropped out of Harvard and Microsoft was formed.

The company went through some rough first years, but eventually were able to license MS-DOS to IBM. The IBM PC took the public by storm, and its success signaled the success of Microsoft. Microsoft continued writing software, for businesses as well as the consumer market. In 1986, the company went public, and Gates became a 31-year old billionaire. The next year, the first version of Windows was introduced, and by 1993 a million copies per month were being sold.

In 1995, Gates knew that the Internet was the next area of focus, and the course of Microsoft shifted dramatically. The popular Internet Explorer browser soon became a bestseller. Today, Microsoft software is everywhere.

bill gates timeline

Bill Gates' Profile/Timeline:

1955 - William Henry Gates III was born on October 28th in Seattle, Washington
1955 - Popularly known as Bill Gates, his family called him "Trey" when he was little
1967 - Bill enrolled in the Lakeside School in Seattle and met Paul Allen
1969 - Bill and Paul (a.k.a "Lakeside Programming Group") reported bugs in exchange for computer time
1972 - Bill and Paul formed Traf-O-Data and developed hardware/software to record highway traffic
1973 - Bill Gates graduated from Lakeside High and enrolled in Harvard University, where he majored in pre-law
1974 - Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed Micro-soft

1975 - Bill and Paul wrote the first computer language called BASIC and licensed it to
MITS
1976 - Bill wrote software routines for BASIC on the Altair to use diskettes for storage
1976 - Gates wrote his famous "Open Letter to Hobbyists", accusing them of software piracy
1976 - Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard
1977 - Bill Gates and Paul Allen officially registers a partnership, and Micro-soft became
Microsoft
1980 - Tim Paterson begans writing an OS for use on Seattle Computer Products' (SCP)
8086-based computer
1980 - IBM repesentatives met Gates and Steve Ballmer to write the OS for their upcoming computer
1980 - They met again and IBM showed the "Acorn" computer running on an 8-bit 8080 processor
1980 - Gates recommended the use of a 16-bit 8086 processor instead and promised an operating system
1980 - SCP ships QDOS 0.10 (Quick & Dirty Operating System)
1980 - Paul Allen approached SCP and purchased the right to resell to an unnamed client for $50,000 - IBM
1980 - Microsoft proposed to be in-charged of IBM's entire software development and convert DOS for IBM's PC
1981 - Microsoft bought all the rights to SCP's DOS and renamed it MS-DOS
1981 - IBM introduced its first desktop, Datamaster, which ran on the 16-bit 8086 CPU
and Microsoft's MS-DOS
1983 - Microsoft announced Windows 1.0
1985 - Bill Gates gave keynote speech at Comdex
1985 - Microsoft released Windows 1.0
1986 - Microsoft is taken public at an IPO price of $21/share
1986 - Bill Gates became a billionaire at 31 years old - the yougest person to do so
1990 - Microsoft released Windows 3.0 and Microsoft sales topped $1 billion for the first time
1994 - Bill Gates and Melinda French got married in Hawaii on January 1st
1994 - Bill Gates becomes the richest person in America
1995 - Microsoft released Windows 95 and Bill Gates became the richest person in the world
1996 - Jennifer Katherine Gates was born on April 26th
1998 - Bill, Melinda and Jennifer moved into their new multi-million dollar house in
Medina, Washington
1998 - Microsoft releases Windows 98
1999 - Bill's fortunes swell to $90 billion and maintains his position on Forbes list as the wealthiest person alive
2000 - Microsoft releases Windows 2000 and Windows ME
2001 - Microsoft releases Windows XP
2002 - Stocks and lawsuits bring his Gates' net worth down to $53 billion - still good enough for #1 on Forbes list
2003 - Microsoft releases Windows Server 2003

2006 - Microsoft releases Windows Vista?

bill gates personal life

Bill Gates married Melinda French of Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. Melinda has given birth to three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). Bill Gates' house is one of the most expensive houses in the world, and is a modern 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is just under $1 million. Also among Gates's private
acquisitions are the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci which
Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994, and a rare Gutenberg Bible.

In 2000, Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization, with his wife. The foundation's grants have provided funds for college scholarships for under-represented minorities, AIDS prevention, diseases prevalent in third world countries, and other causes. In 2000, the Gates Foundation endowed the University of Cambridge with $210 million for the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. The Foundation has also pledged over $7 billion to its various causes, including $1 billion to the United
Negro College Fund; and as of 2005, had an estimated endowment of $29.0 billion. He has spent about a third of his lifetime income on charity. Journalist Greg Palast suggests that the Gates Foundation is used to make tactical donations to hide media sensitive humanitarian side effects of treaties, such as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which Gates has supported. TRIPS requires countries to agree to respect drug and other patents, therefore preventing the local manufacture of existing pharmaceuticals still under patent such as AIDS drugs in Africa.

Gates has received two honorary doctorates, from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002 and Waseda University in 2005. Gates was also given an honorary KBE (Knighthood) from Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in 2005, in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has stated that Gates is probably the most "spammed" person in the world, receiving as many as 4,000,000 e-mails per day in 2004, most of which were junk. Gates has almost an entire department devoted to filtering out junk emails. In an article, Gates himself has said that most of this junk mail "offers to help [him] get out of debt or get rich quick", which "would be funny [given his financial state] if it weren't so irritating".

bill gates microsoft

In December of 1974, Allen was on his way to visit Gates when along the way he stopped to browse the current magazines. What he saw changed his and Bill Gates's lives forever. On the cover of
Popular Electronics was a picture of the Altair 8080 and the headline "World's First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models." He bought the issue and rushed over to Gates's dorm room. They both recognized this as their big opportunity. The two knew that the home computer market was about to explode and that someone would need to make software for the new machines. Within a few days, Gates had called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the makers of the Altair. He told the company that he and Allen had developed a BASIC that could be used on the Altair
[Teamgates.com, 9/29/96]. This was a lie. They had not even written a line of code. They had neither an Altair nor the chip that ran the computer. The MITS company did not
know this and was very interested in seeing their BASIC. So, Gates and Allen began working feverishly on the BASIC they had promised. The code for the program was left mostly up to Bill Gates while Paul Allen began working on a way to simulate the Altair with the schools PDP-10. Eight weeks later, the two felt their program was ready. Allen was to fly to MITS and show off their creation. The day after Allen arrived at MITS, it was time to test their BASIC. Entering the program into the company's Altair was the first time Allen had ever touched one. If the Altair simulation he designed or any of Gates's code was faulty, the demonstration would most likely have ended in failure. This was not the case, and the program worked perfectly the first time [Wallace, 1992, p. 80]. MITS arranged a deal with Gates and Allen to buy the rights to their BASIC.[Teamgates.com, 9/29/96] Gates was convinced that the software market had been born. Within a year, Bill Gates had dropped out of Harvard and Microsoft was formed.

bill gates quotes

If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.”
Famous saying

Life is not fair, get used to it.
Life saying

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Business saying

Patience is a key element of success.
Investment saying

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.
Technology saying

Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness.
Microsoft saying

People everywhere love Windows.
Famous saying

Let's face it, the average computer user has the brain of a Spider Monkey.
Computer saying

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
Inspirational saying

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
Wealth saying


It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
Inspirational saying

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
Inspirational saying

If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
Experience saying

We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
Computer saying

We've got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.
Famous saying

Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.
Microsoft saying

Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Life saying

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.
Experience saying

The best way to prepare to be a programmer is to write programs and to study great programs that other people have written.
Technology saying

In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.
Business saying

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
Business saying

Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you, Find yourself.
Life saying

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spa-m every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so exciting.
Famous saying

Hey, I never told anyone to buy my stock! Besides, no one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year-if you check, you'll see that that's more than most people make in a lifetime!
Stock saying

I have 100 billion dollars... You realize I could spend 3 million dollars a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't make another dime. Tell you what-I'll buy your right arm for a million dollars. I give you a million bucks, and I get to sever your arm right here.
Wealth saying

As you improve health in a society, population growth goes down. You know, I thought it was... before I learned about it, I thought it was paradoxical.
Intelligent saying

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.
Famous saying

Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down.
Intelligent saying

I actually thought that it would be a little confusing during the same period of your life to be in one meeting when you're trying to make money, and then go to another meeting where you're giving it away.
Life saying

I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don't just think, yes my country is doing well, but you think about the world at large.
Life saying

I don't think there's anything unique about human intellience. All the nuerons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion.
Intelligent saying

I have drifted away from thinking about these philanthropic things. And it was only as the wealth got large enough and Melinda and I had talked about the view that that wealth wasn't something that would be good to just pass to the children.
Wealth saying

I mean, if we said right now, there's somebody in the next room who's dying, let's all go save their life, you know, everybody would just get up immediately and go get involved in that.
Famous saying

I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
Computer saying

I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software.
Famous saying

In the decade ahead I can predict that we will provide over twice the productivity improvement that we provided in the '90s.
Famous saying

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.
Communication saying

Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we'd want to get involved.
Life saying

It's been shown that most people download viruses unwittingly - they don't know they're doing it until it's too late. That's what I mean here. We're talking about protecting the consumer.
Computer saying

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
Funny saying

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they're not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.
Online Degree saying

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines... There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.
Intelligent saying

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers - organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative - if we don't solve these security problems, then people will hold back.
Computer saying

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.
Funny saying

So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on.
Business saying

Some people read off of their Palms and Pocket PCs, but the real immersible reading experience takes a full-screen device.
Computer saying

The browser space that we are in we have about 90 percent. Sure, Firefox has come along, and the press love the idea of that. Our commitment is to keep our browser that competes with Firefox to be the best browser - best in security, best in features.
Computer saying

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
Technology saying

The huge turnout for Live 8 here and around the world proves that thanks to the leadership from people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the world is beginning to demand more action on global health and poverty.
Life saying

The Internet will help achieve "friction free capitalism" by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.
Famous saying

The reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said or quotations, there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines.
Famous saying

The two areas that are changing... are information technology and medical technology. Those are the things that the world will be very different 20 years from now than it is today.
Technology saying

There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft.
Famous saying

There are some things that we are always thinking about. For example, when will speech recognition be good enough for everybody to use that? And we have made a lot more progress this year on that. I think we will surprise people a bit on how well we will do on our speech recognition.
Famous saying

There's always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or pornography. The laws for online publishing the same as for print-based publishing, where if you're hosting certain types of things and somebody notifies you about that.
Computer saying

What we're really after is simply that people acquire a legal license for Windows for each computer they own before they move on to Linux or Sun Solaris or BSD or OS/2 or whatever.
Microsoft saying

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.
Famous saying

When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.
Funny saying

Windows 2000 already contains features such as the human discipline component, where the PC can send an electric shock through the keyboard if the human does something that does not please Windows.
Funny saying

The Internet will help achieve "friction free capitalism" by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.
Famous saying

Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.
Computer saying

Microsoft has had its success by doing low-cost products and constantly improving those products and we've really redefined the IT industry to be something that's about a tool for individuals.
Microsoft saying
We are always saying to ourself.. we have to innovate. We got to come up with that breakthrough. In fact, theway software works.. so long as you are using your existing software.. you don't pay us anything at all. So we're only paid for breakthroughs
Famous saying

It's pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We're finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.
Microsoft saying

There is a certain responsibility that accrued to me when I got to this unexpected position.
Famous saying

bill gates role

Bill Gates giving his deposition at Microsoft on August 27, 1998

Since Microsoft's founding in 1975 and as of 2006, Gates has had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy. He has aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft has achieved a dominant position he has vigorously defended it. Many decisions that have led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices have had Gates' approval. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued
over the definitions of words such as: compete, concerned, ask, and we. BusinessWeek reported, "early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying 'I don't recall' so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle. Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail Gates both sent and received."  Despite denials by Bill Gates, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization and tying,
blocking competition, in violation of the Sherman Act.

Gates meets regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. By all accounts he can be extremely confrontational during these meetings, particularly when he believes that managers have not thought out their business strategy or have placed the company's future at risk.  He has been described shouting at length at employees before letting them continue, with such remarks as "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!" and "Why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?" However, he often backs down when the targets of his outbursts respond frankly and directly.When he is not impressed with the technical hurdles managers claim to be facing, he sometimes quips, "Do you want me to do it over the weekend?"

Gates' role at Microsoft for most of its history has been primarily a management and executive role. However, he was an active software developer in the early years, particularly on the company's programming language products. He has not officially been

on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100 line, but he wrote code as late as 1989 that shipped in the company's products.

On June 15, 2006, Gates announced his plans to transition out of a day-to-day role with Microsoft effective July 31, 2008, to allow him to devote more time to working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. During an interview with Fortune.com published on June 26 says his recent decision to "shift priorities" his day-to-day role has changed to June 2008 instead of the original date of July 2008. After that date, Gates will continue in
his role as the company's chairman and act as an advisor on key projects. His role as Chief Software Architect will be filled immediately by Ray Ozzie who joined the company last year due to Microsoft taking over his company Groove. One of his last initiatives before announcing his departure was the creation of a robotics software group at Microsoft.