Essay Writing Topics about BILL GATES

BILL GATES

William Henry Gates, III was born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. He was the middle child of three born to William and Mary Gates Trey, as he was called because of the III was sent to a private school by his father, a lawyer, and mother, a former teacher now on several prestigious boards. At age 13, Bill had completely taught himself programming after taking a computer studies class. After scor­ing a perfect 800 on the mathematics half of the SAT, he gradu­ated from Lakeside school and enrolled at Harvard Univer­sity as a prelaw major. As a student, Gates was a wonder. He received an A in an economics class without attending and cramming the night before the final exam. In June 1975, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to pursue a career in comput­ers full time.

Later that year after dropping out of Harvard he moved to New Mexico. There he and Allen Kay established Microsoft to produce their Basic for the MITS. Eighteen months later, they were a few hundred thousand dollars richer and were hired by Tandy to develop software for its radio shack com­puters. Gates and Allen then moved their headquarters to Seattle, Washington. In Seattle, Gates re-wrote an operating system and called it MS-DOS, which stands for Microsoft Disk Operating System. Microsoft would eventually sell the rights of MS-DOS to IBM, making it a major computer cor­poration. Other computer companies wanted Microsoft to produce software for their computers, including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple computers. With the operating system established, Gates and Microsoft set out to create ap­plications software, for tasks such as financial analysis or word processing. Microsoft has continued being successful through the years and will be in the future as long as it keeps innovating new and exciting computer software.

Bill Gates has his eye on the future. He sees the world in ‘ a powerful, high-speed network-both within companies and across the so called Information Superhighway. He hopes to be on top of the Transformation from Personal Computers to nets. Gates predicts that an explosion of low-cost, high-ca­pacity, networks will radically alter how we use technology in the upcoming decade.

Now before Bill Gates came onto the scene in the early seventies, the main focus in the computer world was hard­ware. Chips, circuit boards, capacitors and controllers these were what computers were all about at this time. Companies like IBM, Compaq and Apple were at the head of the pack in the industry that pushed hefty boxes of metal and plastic and silicon at thousands of bucks a pop. No one had yet attempted to tap the software business, a market that was inevitably going to grow as fast of faster than its complimentary hardware market. Bill gates saw this opportunity and took advantage of it.

When William Henry Gates came into the world in the year 1955, the fledgling computer industry was still trying to spread its wings and fly. On the day he was born in 1955, fewer than 500 electronic computers had existed in the entire world, their total retail value amounted to less than $200 mil­lion, and the term software had not yet been coined. Bill first laid a hand on a computer in 1968 while in junior high school. The computer business was rapidly transforming at this time, and so was Bill Gates. He saw the real profitable side of com­puters was not their hardware. Rather it was the software end of the business. Good software is what makes a computer exciting and easy to use. Bill Gates grabbed this concept and ran with it. The result: As of 1993 Gates was personally worth more than $2 billion, and his company, Microsoft, was val­ued at more than $7 billion.

As Microsoft and the software industry grew, the com­puter hardware manufacturers no longer saw the opportunity to exploit Bill Gates’ company, as they had done initially with BASIC, one of the first programs Microsoft produced. Rather, they saw Bill Gates and Microsoft as the Controller of their destinies. Microsoft software had become so popular that if your hardware could not run it, you were certain of defeat. Throughout the early 80’s, Bill was the ruler of the computer industry. His decisions on which machines to back and which to ignore helped to make companies and break them. Heads of firms that created computers and microprocessors regu­larly make pilgrimages to Microsoft’s wooded headquarters in Redmond, Washington, to sit at the feet of the master.

In 1986, Microsoft again revolutionized the computer industry and launched its first version of Windows. Microsoft called Windows an operating environment, meaning it was designed mainly to run other programs. The difference be­tween this system and the original BASIC language was that Windows incorporated a Graphical user interface or GUI, (pronounced as gooey) as it was known in the industry. This interface gave a symbolic representation of a desktop to every computer screen across the country, complete with little pic­tures called icons to signify different files and programs. Opening these files and programs was like opening different windows, hence the name. Finally, non-Macintosh personal computers had become user friendly; no longer was it seen by the majority of the consuming public as a cold, high-tech piece of equipment whose secrets could only be unlocked by some alien script.

The first seven years after the announcement of win­dows, however, was not exactly smooth sailing for Bill Gates and Microsoft. Over those seven years, the windows story had been one of tepid reviews, backhanding compliments, empty hype, and sluggish sales. If these problems were not enough, in the same period, Apple computer, headed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, had sued Microsoft accusing the com­pany of stealing their Macintosh ideas for the Windows ap­plication.

Despite all of these setbacks, Windows finally caught on and spread like wildfire. Since its introduction, Microsoft has introduced numerous updated versions of the original windows application software, the most recent being Win-dows 95. Like the introduction of the original Windows pro­gram; however, the Windows 95 version was anything but smooth. Microsoft again found itself in another legal battle, but this time it was up against the U. S. Justice Department although the department will confirm only that it is conduct­ing an unspecified investigation in the computer industry, it appears to have launched three antitrust probes into Bill Gates Empire reported the June 24, 1995 issue of the Economic magazine. The basis behind these probes was focused upon possible misuse of licensing agreements and royalty fees by Microsoft with many personal computer makers.

Just as the operating software of Bill Gates and Microsoft become the standard of personal computers, so would Mr. Gates like to dominate the software end of the up and coming multimedia market. This market spans from virtual reality video games to interactive multimedia programming on ca­ble television. To begin its movement into this market, Gates now has a contract to supply software to Sega, a Japanese video-games maker who’s central character, a hyperactive hedgehog called Sonic, is the industry’s hottest property. In addition to Sega, Mr. Gates has also been talking to Time Warner and TCI about forming a venture, to be known as Cable Soft that should set standards for interactive TV.

Bill Gates and his company Microsoft have been at the head of the rapidly changing computer industry for much of its existence. If profit margins and stock prices continue to grow and Microsoft products continue to be household names, the duo will remain in this position will into the future.