Bill Gates and His Accomplishments

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 IBM’s 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 didn’t know was t...

... middle of paper ...

...ws because it offers multiple technological benefits, compared to a stand-alone browser such as Netscape’s Navigator. Microsoft argues that PC makers work with Windows because it can be modified, and any extra software can easily be installed.

Both of the arguments stated are convincing. The case between the government and Microsoft is like no other. The government believes that Microsoft has gone extreme measures to find Microsoft guilty and right now they are trying to find out how Microsoft should be punished. “ The political right of an individual to his own life is an essential principle of liberty. And it rests on the moral rightness of acting to sustain one’s own life, which includes generating the material wealth life requires” (Bernstein, K3970).

Bill Gates may seem like a horrible man to many of his competitors, but his contribution to the world of computers has been enormous. His biggest accomplishment as far as Microsoft goes is not just creating good software, but because he knew that software was the way to make the most money. It is the reason more people use the Microsoft operating system than any other.