A Tribute to the Great Legend Bill Gates on his retirement from Microsoft 

 

Bill Gates. Perhaps every one knows this person very well, today. No proper words will describe him, in my dictionary. To me and to most of us, he is a great living legend who perhaps did magical wonders to the software industry and also to the humanity. When sun came down in the west, on July 27, 2008, a page turned over in the history. Gates, as per pre planned, retired from a majestic Microsoft, which he founded along with his friend Paul Allen, which made him perhaps an undisputed king of all times in the history of Computer Science and Engineering. A great dominating era in software industry has come to an end.
Well, from being dropped out of a university, Bill Gates had a dozen of luck, and tougher task ahead of him, which made him an excellent business man and world’s richest man, which he himself was never thought to be, as you know that, it is rather difficult for a man to come up in his career, after being labeled as an drop out. How he achieved it, forms a long fairy tale interesting story. Now, let us start our most majestic journey into the great career of Sir. Bill Gates.

Bill Gates early childhood

William Henry Gates the III was born on October 28, 1955, to a lucky couple, Williams H Gates Sr. and Marry Max Well Gates, in Seattle, Washington. No one predicted that the new born boy baby would be the world’s richest person, one day. His father was a lawyer by profession and mother served in the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and in the united way. Gates has got one elder sister named Kristianne and an younger sister named Libby. Earlier in his life, Gates parents had a lawyer career in mind for him. But, that, dream went to side lines, when he was in the 8th grade.

Bill Gates Education

At the age of 13, bill enrolled for Lakeside school, an exclusively preparatory school, which is said to be a turning point. It all began to create a new page in the history, when the mothers club at the school used funds arisen out of profit from sale of some miscellaneous things collected in the club, to purchase an ASR-33 teletype terminal and also a block of General Electric computers for school students. Gates developed a special interest in GE terminal computer and went ahead to learn and develop programs using programming language BASIC. He was excused from attending the Maths classes, while doing so. He developed his first major program on his own, which is an implementation of game called as tic-tac-toe. This is, perhaps the turning point in his career. In fact, Gates was always thinking, how the machine could execute his program perfectly without giving any problems. I think, as a professional programmer, that also one way, helped Gates to understand computer programming better.

Laying first foundation stones, for a great distinguished career

Gates got a chance to work in Computer Center Corporation (CCC), along with three other Lakeside students banned by the same CCC for the summer, after it caught them exploring and misused the bugs found in CCC’s operating system, after the ban was lifted. The four students were, Gates himself, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland and Kent Evans. The four offered to debug CCC’s software in exchange for free computer time. Instead of using the system via teletype, Gates intentionally went personally to CCC’s offices and studied source code for various source code that were kept in their offices, which included Fortran, LISP, and finally the machine language. This arrangement went till 1970, when CCC winded up their business. The next year itself, Information Sciences Inc. hired these four students to write Payroll program in COBOL providing them the computer and royalties. After administrators came to know about the abilities, Gates was made to write the school’s computer program to schedule students in classes. To ones surprise, Gates later on, modified code so that he was placed in classes with most female students!

Coming in contact with Paul Allen…

At age 17, gates formed a team up with Paul Allen, to make traffic counters which was based on Intel 8088 processor, a project called as Traf-O-Data. That year they earned $20,000. The business slowed down because of Gate’s young under age. At age of 18, in 1973, Gates got graduated from Lakeside school, where he scored 1590 out of 1600, in the standardized tests for college admissions across the US.

Harvard student to Microsoft chairman…

In fall of 1973, Gates took admission at the Harvard University. It was he who met his future partner Steve Ballmer, here. He also met many great personalities here, including computer scientists of that time, with whom he worked with various algorithms. But, he had one problem, which in turn produced one of the greatest business man of the world. Gates did not have a definite study plan, which made him go on leave from 1975 on. But, to his grace, processor manufacturer Intel had released Intel 8088 CPU. It was his luck and he realized that it was the first computer chip which could run BASIC and could be affordable to run inside a personal computer. The cost of the chip was around $200 at that time. He realized the advantageous situation he earned at that moment, which many of us drop, fearing heavy losses, and started sharing his plans with his parents and decided to start a company with right spirits with Paul Allen.

Facts about Bill Gates

It was, after reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, Gates got a clear vision of what he is going to do in future. The magazine had demonstrated the Altair 8800 in this issue. Gates contacted the creators of Altair, the MITS, saying that, he and others are working on a BASIC interpreter for the same platform. In reality, Bill Gates and Allen did not prepare anything for the same nor had Altair with them. They were just gauging MITS’s interests. They were surprised, when MITS’s president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo. They then immediately started working on the project and within a few weeks, they designed and developed Altair emulator that ran on minicomputer and then of course, the BASIC interpreter. The very crucial demonstration of the project was held and it satisfied all including the MITS president, resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the product as Altair BASIC. It also opened a big door for Bill Gates to become Millionaire of 1990’s and 2000’s. Paul Allen got absorbed into MITS. Bill took leave of absence from University of Harvard, and joined Paul Allen at MITS in Albuquerque during November 1975. They eventually named their partnership as “Micro-Soft” and worked together. One year later, they registered the trade name “Microsoft” (without the hyphen), with the United States Patents and Trademark Office (USPTO). Thus, a new era was born.

Starting five years of Microsoft

Microsoft continued sales of BASIC interpreter, which was popular interpreter of all times at that time. Microsoft continued to develop programming languages, even after it departed ways with MITS. The company shifted its office from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington on January 1979 for an expansion. During these days, all employees had responsibility for company’s business strategies. Gates continued to develop coding for various projects and personally reviewed every line of code, which company shipped to its clients and often rewrote the part of the code, which got high magnitude of problems.

From BASIC to Operating System development

Actually, this was another turning point, in Bill Gates history, when Personal Computer manufacturer, IBM contacted Microsoft for making a version of BASIC for it’s upcoming personal computer, the then IBM PC. They were impressed by performance of Microsoft. So, they approached Microsoft for the development of operating system. Upon receiving the offer, Bill Gates put forth the idea of development of 86-DOS (QDOS). Microsoft made a deal with Seattle Computer Products (SCP) to develop the QDOS which was similar to the SCP’s CP/M. After developing and adapting the CP/M operating system, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS in exchange of one time fees of $80,000. Gates kept the copyright of PC-DOS with permission from IBM. Later, Microsoft re-modified the source code of PC-DOS and released MS-DOS which enjoyed great success, than PC-DOS, and MS-DOS development cycle went on till its version 6.22.

Gate opened windows… From MS-DOS to MS-Windows… It’s really amazing..

Gates was really happy to see the success of MS-DOS. He continued releasing its improved versions. I think that, Bill Gates had a vision of GUI OS in his mind and that’s what made him one of the greatest ever billionaire, not only in United States, but, also all over the world. During later part of 1985, gates realized that people wanted new set of easily accessible tools to popularize the use of computers and Microsoft released its first ever retail version of Windows to its users. Subsequently, the company stuck a deal with IBM to develop a separate GUI operating system called OS/2. Although Microsoft started developing the OS/2 project, some creativity differences terminated the partnership.
After that, Microsoft developed and released the newer versions of Windows, among it, 3.1 was great success. Due to this, Microsoft developed a new operating system itself, which was based on MS-DOS platform, the Windows 95. Windows 95 had a attractive Desktop, GUI of that time. People got more attracted to it. Even I too got more attracted to the design of Windows 95. During 1998, Microsoft improved Windows 95, and released Windows 98. He started to be figured in Forbes world’s richest persons, during this period and became number one during 1995, until 2008. Oh… 13 years… It’s really amazing run…
Apart from client sided operating systems, Microsoft has released many versions of server sided operating systems. Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows 2008 Server, are the server sided operating systems, the company has release so far.

Apart from windows, what?

Apart from Windows operating systems, the company has developed many system and office packages, database, and games programs. Microsoft developed MS-Office, which has grown to Office 2007 now. The relational database management system, SQL Server has been a main competitor to Oracle.

Our beloved Gates… Is it a great fall or just a small glitch that you received? Mr. Gates…

After the release of Windows 98, Windows ME was made available to users. Microsoft was still very popular at this stage. But, the gained name and fame and popularity began to decline, when Microsoft released stronger and stricter operating system, Windows XP, which I think so. Perhaps this operating system brought down the popularity and reputation of company with its so called Genuine Advantage Program, which so many computer specialists believe. Microsoft has been now struggling to sell the less popular the latest Windows version, the Windows Vista, on which many older programs won’t run at all. Some devices won’t get detected at all in it.
I was just wondering… Mr. Gates, just before his retirement, another strong man Warren Buffett, of course, his friend only has conquered his place, and pushed him out to a too bad 3rd position that too in the same financial year, which he had safeguarded till 13 valuable years!!... Is it the beginning of an End? Mr. Gates… Will answer to this question… Please? Or will you leave it to the almighty and the time to answer?