Bill Gates of Microsoft

Born in 1955, in Seattle ,Washington, his father a corporate lawyer and his mother a school teacher. Gates attended Seattle's most exclusive prep school, where he developed his programming skills at the age of 13 on the school's minicomputer.   By age 17, Gates had sold his first program-a timetabling system for the school, raking in $4,200.  WOW! Do you think his friends were green with envy?

A Harvard Dropout!
 While at Harvard, Gates and Paul Allen co-authored the original Altair BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 (the first commercially successful personal computer) in the mid 1970s.  BASIC is an easy-to-learn programming language developed at Dartmouth College for teaching purposes.

Microsoft is a Reality for 2
(barely out of their teens)

The computer bug hits Gates (with Allen) at age 20, in 1975.  The name came from the fact that it provided microcomputer software.  Gates did indeed drop out of Harvard to pursue the software company.  In 1980 an agreement was signed for the operating system known as MS-DOS for IBM. A slick move on Microsoft's part allowed them to license the operating system to other manufacturers which led to the massive industry of "IBM-compatible" personal computers who were dependent on Microsoft's operating system. Let's get hit on the head with some facts you will find in the web resources listed below.  Choose 3C or 3D. Go ahead and find out what Bill Gates decides. Don't forget to take notes either on the computer or on paper.

 
Web Resources

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3428721.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/bio.asp


 
Choice 3C
Bill Gates Steps Down
Go Back
Choice 3D
Extortion and Pies