Pioneers of Computer Programming
When you think of 21st century computing, two things come to mind: Windows and video games. Learning Team A introduces you to the two men responsible for these phenomena Bill Gates and Nolan Bushnell.
William Henry Gates III
During that late 1960's and early 1970's, BASIC was one of the premier programming languages. At that time, Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen made the commitment to learn BASIC by reading the user manuals. In exchange for computer time, they made an agreement with a local company called the Computer Center Corporation to provide de-bugging services for software on the company's DEC machine. This time was used not only to search for errors, but also to study the operating systems from any discarded code they came across. Moreover, during this time Gates continued to expand his knowledge of computer programming as he taught himself other programming languages including FORTRAN, LISP and PDP-10 machine language. (Reitz, 1996)
After the C.C.C. went out of business, Gates and his friends were forced to find a new company located in Portland that used the same PDP-10 machine. Gates negotiated with the managers of the company to let him and his friends write a COBOL payroll program in exchange for free computer time (Reitz, 2006). Through this project, Gates and friends learned much about payroll systems, taxes, and labor reports - invaluable information that they would later rely on when starting Microsoft.
In 1973, Gates decided to enroll at Harvard University to study mathematics or law. During his time at Harvard, Allen and Gates found a copy of Popular Electronics magazine, which had on the cover a picture of the Altair, a computer kit which you could ass...
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Reitz, S. (1996). A Man With a Vision: William Henry Gates III. Retrieved August 28, 2007, from http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Gates.html.
Being his life’s most world renowned accomplishment, Microsoft was the beginning factor in Bill Gate’s cultural impact, paving the way for greater technological advances an...
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Overall the speech-structure, sense of wisdom, and experience, topped by his widely recognized success, empowers his speech to be strongly convincing. Meanwhile, the fallacies and faith requiring combinations of propositions Jobs’ gives, topped by a bit of contradictory context in the eyes of the audience, deducts from the intensity of his overall persuasion. Given the circumstances, the audience, and the situation, Steve Jobs was able to deliver a notably strong, somewhat inspirational and lifting final word to the Stanford graduates that day on June 12th 2005.
After completing their second year of college Gates and Allen had decided to make their own software company. They started out with Micro-Soft as the first name of the company but later took the hyphen. Gates had soon went back to school at harvard however he dropped out in 1977 before he graduated. On his time out he soon devoted himself to Microsoft and made it his full-time Job. This would help him find the problems and fix them. It would make the company a lot stronger and better. “In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, two young computer hobbyists from Palo Alto, California, unveiled the prototype for the Apple 1 computer. A local computer dealer saw the Apple 1 and ordered 100 pre-assembled units. Over the next 10 months, about 200 Apple 1’s were sold.” (Musolf).
Elliot, Jay (2012). Leading Apple with Steve Jobs: Management Lessons From a Controversial Genius. Retrieved from http://www.eblib.com
Then came Linus Benedict Torvalds. At the time he was a sophomore majoring in Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, his hobby also included computer programming. At 21 he found himself spending most of his time toying with computer systems, trying to see what he could do in order to push their limits and increase their functionality. The key missing in his tests was an operating system that had the flexibility craved for by professionals. MINIX was available, though it was still just a stu...
Ceruzzi, P. E. (1998). A history of modern computing (pp. 270-272). London, England: The MIT Press.
The purpose of writing this essay is to give an idea how these two respected CEOs of multinational companies has changed the world. Technology is booming nowadays, even the minor things that we can do manually are done using technology. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple computer and Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has changed the world. These two leaders are best known for their innovations which has taken our world to the next level. Steve and Bill has got something in common. Surprisingly, both of these CEO had never graduated from college, but they are known to be the world most successful leaders and they both work in the same kind of company (Lashinsky, 2013). Nevertheless, their leadership styles differs (Peralta,2011). The way they treat the employees at the workplace is in contrast.
While Bill Gates was at junior high a group of parents raise money to purchase the first computerized terminal in the school. When that happened he decided to take all his time to work on that system teaming with other students to learn about different operating systems. He excelled in his learning of systems and he started developing ideas to make business with companies in order to learn how they make their terminals. His mind for busi...
So here I present you the path that gave us the Bill Gates we have today. Firstly, Bill Gates was fortunate enough to be born in a fine and educated family, where his parents were an educator and a lawyer. He had the privilege to all the essential necessities, such as clothing, food, and water sources which many other kids do not have. More than that, his family was wealthy enough to buy him toys and games and other things which would be far too extravagant to others. These small things created a stronger foundation for Bill Gates’
Gates and Allen soon got many opportunities to prove their computer skills. In 1972, they started their own company called 'Traf-O-Data.' They developed a portable computer that allowed them t...