Profiles of the Rich - Bill Gates
#1 William Gates III is the richest man in the world
at the age of 51 he has accumulated a net worth of $56 Billion
dollars! He was born on October 28th, 1955 in Seattle, Washington.
This primary source of wealth came from Microsoft. He is an
American citizen and currently resides in Medina, Washington.
He is happily married and has 3 children. In terms of education,
Bill Gates attended Harvard University and dropped out. In his
early life, Gates grew up in a wealth family. His mother was
on the board of directors for the First Interstate Bank and
the United Way, while his fater was a successful lawyer. Bill
read the Popular Electronics issue in January of 1975 Gates
was interested in the MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry
Systems) which were the creator of the new microcomputer. Gates
contacted the company and informed them that he was working
on a BASIC interpretrer for the platform. Gates and Allen (his
partner) didn't actually have anything in terms of written code
for the project. All they wanted to do was get MITS interest.
Once the president of MIT contacted them for a meeting Gates
and Allen created the demonstration and presented it to MIT.
A deal was immediately created to distribute the interpreter
as Altair Basic. Paul Allen was hired on board MITS and Bill
left Harvard to work with Allen at MITS creating a partnership
called "Micro-soft" in November 1975. Within one year
the tradename "Microsoft" was registered with the
USPTO (United States Patent And Trademark Office). Microsoft's
BASIC leaked out before the copy hit the market and it was being
copied and distributed by many hobbyists. Bill wrote a letter
stating that payment was required for the programme and that
it should be mandatory that software developers demand payment.
In 1976 Microsoft became independent from MITS and continued
to create new programmes and other software languages for different
systems.
During the early years of Microsoft, Gates did a lot of the
work and micromanaged his company. Employees were often responsible
for many duties. For example a sales person would answer the
phone, and also be responsible for packaging and shipping out
goods. Gates being very detail oriented would go over written
code himself to ensure it was perfect. Gates proposed using
86-DOS (QDOS) as an operating system and Microsoft made a deal
with SCP Seattle Computer Products) to become the exclusive
licensing agent and (later full owner) of QDOS. After adapting
the operating system for the PC, Microsoft sold it to BM as
PC-DOS for a large sum of money. Companies soon reverse-engineered
the IBM programme and created clones, but Microsoft was one
step ahead of the game by licensing the DOS to other manufacturers
calling it MC-DOS. Microsoft went from a small business to one
of the largest software companies in the home computer industry
as a result of aggressive and rapid partnerships with these
manufacturers. In addition to this Microsoft continued to improve
and develop operating systems as well as software apps. In the
1980's Microsoft introduced "Windows" as an addition
to the DOS command line and to compete with other systems on
the market that had GUI (Graphical User Interface). The release
of Windows 3.0 in 1990 was a great success selling around 10
million copies in the first 2 years! By continuing to ensure
that most computers came with Microsoft software pre-installed,
the Microsoft corporation became the largest software company
in the world making Gates the richest man in the world for the
last 13 consecutive years. Microsoft has thousands of Patents
and Gates has 9 patents to his name.
