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 IBMs 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 didnt know was that Gates didnt have a disc operating system.
Microsoft bought the product and idea afterwards from a small company in Texas for
$50,000, improved it, then brought it to IBM as their own. IBM purchased “DOS” from
Microsoft for $125,000. IBM called the system PC-DOS. “Gates spent a hectic year
perfecting the operating software that controls the IBM PC” (People Weekly, 36). In the
contract, it stated that Microsoft had the right to license “DOS” to other companies as well.
