Famous IT

Personality in
Computer
 BILL GATES
Famous IT Personalities | Famous IT Personalities In
Computers. William Henry “Bill” Gates III. Bill Gates co-
founded 'Microsoft Corporation' in 1975 with Paul G. Allen .
Some more information about Bill Gates
 William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and
philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend
Paul Allen.[2][3] During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman,
chief executive officer (CEO), president and chief software architect, while also being the
largest individual shareholder until May 2014.[4] He was a major entrepreneur of the
microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
 Gates was born and raised in Seattle. In 1975, he and Allen founded Microsoft in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. It became the world's largest personal computer software
company.[5][a] Gates led the company as chairman and CEO until stepping down as CEO in
January 2000, succeeded by Steve Ballmer, but he remained chairman of the board of
directors and became chief software architect. [8] During the late 1990s, he was
criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive. This
opinion has been upheld by numerous court rulings. [9] In June 2008, Gates transitioned to
a part-time role at Microsoft and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the
private charitable foundation he and his then-wife Melinda established in 2000.[10] He
stepped down as chairman of the board of Microsoft in February 2014 and assumed a new
post as technology adviser to support the newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.[11] In March
2020, Gates left his board positions at Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to focus on his
philanthropic efforts on climate change, global health and development, and education.[12]
 Since 1987, Gates has been included in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people.[13]
[14]
From 1995 to 2017, he held the Forbes title of the richest person in the world every
year except from 2010 to 2013.[15] In October 2017, he was surpassed by Amazon founder
and CEO Jeff Bezos, who had an estimated net worth of US$90.6 billion compared to
Gates's net worth of US$89.9 billion at the time. [16] As of January 2023, Gates has an
estimated net worth of US$108.3 billion, making him the sixth-richest person in the world.
 Early life of Bill Gates
 Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955.[3]
He is the son of William H. Gates Sr. [b] (1925–2020) and
Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994).[22] His ancestry includes English,
German, and Irish/Scots-Irish.[23] His father was a prominent lawyer,
and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate
BancSystem and the United Way of America. Gates's maternal
grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has
an older sister Kristi (Kristianne) and a younger sister Libby. He is
the fourth of his name in his family but is known as William Gates III
or "Trey" (i.e., three) because his father had the "II" suffix. [24][25] The
family lived in the Sand Point area of Seattle in a home that was
damaged by a rare tornado when Gates was seven years old. [26]
 Early in his life, Gates observed that his parents wanted him to
pursue a law career.[27] When he was young, his family regularly
attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a
Protestant Reformed denomination.[28][29][30] Gates was small for his
age and was bullied as a child.[25] The family encouraged
competition; one visitor reported that "it didn't matter whether it
was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock; there was always
a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing .
 At 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school,[32][33] where he wrote
his first software program.[34] When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers'
Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to
buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a
General Electric (GE) computer for the students.[35] Gates took an interest in
programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math
classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this
machine, an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games
against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it
would always execute software code perfectly.[36] After the Mothers Club
donation was exhausted, Gates and other students sought time on systems
including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10
belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC) which banned Gates,
Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Gates's best friend and first business partner
Kent Evans, for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the
operating system to obtain free computer time. [37][25]
The four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to make money. [25] At
the end of the ban, they offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for
extra computer time. Rather than using the system remotely via Teletype,
Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that
ran on the system, including Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. The
arrangement with CCC continued until 1970 when the company went out of
business.
 The following year, a Lakeside teacher enlisted Gates and Evans to automate the
school's class-scheduling system, providing them computer time and royalties in return.
The duo worked diligently in order to have the program ready for their senior year.
Towards the end of their junior year, Evans was killed in a mountain climbing accident,
which Gates has described as one of the saddest days of his life. Gates then turned to
Allen who helped him finish the system for Lakeside. [25]
 At 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen called Traf-O-Data to make traffic counters
based on the Intel 8008 processor.[38] In 1972, he served as a congressional page in the
House of Representatives.[39][40] He was a National Merit Scholar when he graduated from
Lakeside School in 1973.[41] He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests
(SAT) and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973.[42][43] He chose a pre-law
major but took mathematics (including Math 55) and graduate level computer science
courses.[44] While at Harvard, he met fellow student Steve Ballmer. Gates left Harvard
after two years while Ballmer stayed and graduated magna cum laude. Years later,
Ballmer succeeded Gates as Microsoft's CEO and maintained that position from 2000
until his resignation in 2014. [45][46]
 Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of
unsolved problems[47] presented in a combinatorics class by professor Harry Lewis. His
solution held the record as the fastest version for over 30 years, and its successor is
faster by only 2%.[47][48] His solution was formalized and published in collaboration with
Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.[49]
 Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen and joined him at Honeywell during the
summer of 1974.[50] In 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 was released based on the
Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw the opportunity to start their own computer
software company.[51] Gates dropped out of Harvard that same year. His parents were
supportive of him after seeing how much he wanted to start his own company. [52] He
explained his decision to leave Harvard: "if things hadn't worked out, I could always go
[53]
 Basic
 Gates read the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics which demonstrated the Altair 8800, and he
contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to inform them that he and others were
working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. [54] In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had
not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to
meet them for a demonstration, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator
that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration was held at MITS's offices
in Albuquerque, New Mexico; it was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter
as Altair BASIC. MITS hired Allen, [55] and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with him at
MITS in November 1975. Allen named their partnership "Micro-Soft", a combination of "microcomputer"
and "software", and their first office was in Albuquerque. The first employee Gates and Allen hired was
their high school collaborator Ric Weiland.[55] They dropped the hyphen within a year and officially
registered the trade name "Microsoft" with the Secretary of the State of New Mexico on November 26,
1976.[55] Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies.
 Microsoft's Altair BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy
had leaked out and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, he wrote an
Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter in which he asserted that more than 90% of the users of
Microsoft Altair BASIC had not paid Microsoft for it and the Altair "hobby market" was in danger of
eliminating the incentive for any professional developers to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality
software.[56] This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that
software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late
1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems. [55] The company
moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979. [54]
 Gates said he personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code that the company produced in its
first five years. As the company grew, he transitioned into a manager role, then an executive. [57]
 DONKEY.BAS, is a computer game written in 1981 and included with early versions of the PC DOS operating
system distributed with the original IBM PC. It is a driving game in which the player must avoid hitting
donkeys. The game was written by Gates and Neil Konzen.
 IMB Partnership
 IBM, the leading supplier of computer equipment to commercial enterprises at the time, approached
Microsoft in July 1980 concerning software for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC,[60] after
Bill Gates's mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, mentioned Microsoft to John Opel, IBM's CEO.[61] IBM first
proposed that Microsoft write the BASIC interpreter. IBM's representatives also mentioned that they
needed an operating system, and Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the
widely used CP/M operating system.[62] IBM's discussions with Digital Research went poorly, however,
and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing
difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Gates and asked if Microsoft could provide an operating
system. A few weeks later, Gates and Allen proposed using 86-DOS, an operating system similar to
CP/M, that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had made for hardware similar to the
PC.[63] Microsoft made a deal with SCP to be the exclusive licensing agent of 86-DOS, and later the
full owner. Microsoft employed Paterson to adapt the operating system for the PC [64] and delivered it
to IBM as PC DOS for a one-time fee of $50,000. [65]
 The contract itself only earned Microsoft a relatively small fee. It was the prestige brought to
Microsoft by IBM's adoption of their operating system that would be the origin of Microsoft's
transformation from a small business to the leading software company in the world. Gates had not
offered to transfer the copyright on the operating system to IBM because he believed that other
personal computer makers would clone IBM's PC hardware. [65] They did, making the IBM-compatible
PC, running DOS, a de facto standard. The sales of MS-DOS (the version of DOS sold to customers
other than IBM) made Microsoft a major player in the industry. [66] The press quickly identified
Microsoft as being very influential on the IBM PC. PC Magazine asked if Gates was "the man behind
the machine?".[60]
 Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the
company in Washington state and made Gates the president and chairman of the board, with Paul
Allen as vice president and vice chairman. In early 1983, Allen left the company after receiving a
Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, effectively ending the formal business partnership between Gates and
Allen, which had been strained months prior due to a contentious dispute over Microsoft equity. [54][67]
Later in the decade, Gates repaired his relationship with Allen and together the two donated millions
 Windows
 Microsoft and Gates launched their first retail version of Microsoft Windows
on November 20, 1985, in an attempt to fend off competition from Apple's
Macintosh GUI, which had captivated consumers with its simplicity and
ease of use.[69] In August of the following year, the company struck a deal
with IBM to develop a separate operating system called OS/2. Although the
two companies successfully developed the first version of the new system,
the partnership deteriorated due to mounting creative differences. [70] The
operating system grew out of DOS in an organic fashion over a decade
until Windows 95, which hid the DOS prompt by default. Windows XP,
released one year after Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO, was the first
to not be based on DOS.[71] Windows 8.1 was the last version of the OS
released before Gates left the chair of the firm to John W. Thompson on
February 5, 2014.
 Management Style
 During Microsoft's early years, Gates was an active software developer,
particularly in the company's programming language products, but his
primary role in most of the company's history was as a manager and
executive. He has not officially been on a development team since working
on the TRS-80 Model 100,[73] but he wrote code that shipped with the
company's products as late as 1989.[74] Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1985 when
Gates announced Microsoft Excel: "Bill Gates likes the program, not
because it's going to make him a lot of money (although I'm sure it will do
that), but because it's a neat hack."[75]
 On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would transition out of his role
at Microsoft to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He gradually divided his
responsibilities between two successors when he placed Ray Ozzie in
charge of management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product
strategy.[76] The process took two years to fully transfer his duties to Ozzie
and Mundie, and was completed on June 27, 2008.[77]
THAN
K
YOU