Bill Gates The Man

What is Windows? What is Microsoft Word? What is Excel 1.0? These are all product of

Microsoft. What is Microsoft? It is a 18 billion dollar computer program corporation that Bill Gates is

running. He strives for what he believes in, which is doing the best he can for the computer world. He also

never gave up at things even though they did not work out right away. Bill Gates started his journey when

he was young. Know he is seeking to improve the future. Bill Gates is a major cultural icon that is trying

to help us out with the visions of computers.

CHAPTER 1-The Past

William Henry Gates III was born October 28, 1955, with his family in Seattle, Washington. He

was the middle child and his father, a lawyer and his mother, a teacher. Bill was sent to Lakeside School,

an all boys prep school. Lakeside is where Gates taught himself to hack his way into a minicomputer

program. Hacking is basically decoding how the computer works. This is also where he made his first

software program when he was thirteen, a tic-tac-toe game. In order to play the game Gates and other class

mates had to flip switches and then had to wait, for a long time, for the reply to come out. Paul Allen, a

classmate of Gates, helped Gates create

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Microsoft. Gates, Allen and a group of friends were offered to create a program for payroll services (Gross

337). Gates also formed a pint-sized company, Traf-O-Data, that studied traffic patterns for small towns

near Seattle.

Gates was 19 when he graduated from school then he moved on to Harvard. Gates spent most of his time

hacking at the computer lab. He also did not attend many of his classes. Allen and Gates worked on

making a BASIC program for a minicomputer. BASIC is a language a computer uses to run its system.

That program was used in computers now. This kept the men writing their programs. In 1975 the two

founded what was then, Micro-soft (Gross 339). Gates did all of this before the young age of twenty-one.