The Contribution Of Bill Gates, Technology And Technology

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William Gates III, commonly known as Bill Gates, is a major figure in the field of computing and has been since the 1970’s. Gates’ most well-known contribution is the founding and continuation of Microsoft, a major player in the software industry. Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 with long time friend Paul Allen. Since then, Microsoft has grown to a 49 building campus in Redmond, Washington, with thousands of employees (Sherman 31). Bill Gates has had a tremendous part in the personal computing development, and surely the technology industry today would be different without him. Gates was born on October 28th, 1955 in Seattle as the son of a lawyer. It was obvious in his childhood that he would be brilliant and different, which became apparent …show more content…

To do this, Gates “persuaded large corporations like General Electric and NCR that they needed Microsoft BASIC to run on their existing computer systems” (Watson 154). Gates’ efforts made BASIC the leading programming language. With the popularity of BASIC, along came the idea of pirating software. The hobbyists that wanted to use BASIC did not want to pay for it, and began to illegally copy it. Gates wrote a strongly worded open letter to these hobbyists, and effectively accused them of theft (Watson 153). He did not let this stop him from continuing to conquer software, and he was still not satisfied. Gates envisioned a world where the average person used a computer to perform tasks, such as bookkeeping and writing. To accommodate future growth, Microsoft moved from Albuquerque, Mexico to outside of Seattle, Washington. It was then, in 1980, that IBM presented Gates with the biggest break of his career yet (Sherman …show more content…

To this point, the Apple Macintosh had a very different operating system than the dominating Microsoft DOS: its GUI. It allowed users to be able to click on things they wanted to open instead of typing in commands. Of the GUI, Gates said “to create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination—and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard” (Watson 159). Of course, after recognizing that Apple’s OS was more user-friendly and appealing than Microsoft’s DOS, Gates’ created Microsoft Windows, which also employed the GUI system. Apple sued Microsoft for copying their idea, which caused Gates to have to license the right to have Windows look like the Mac OS. Windows did not catch on right away, probably because most software programs were still being written to work with MS-DOS or the Macintosh. It took several versions for Windows to catch on. In spite of Windows’ apparent failure, Gates became a billionaire in 1986, when he was 31 years old. In 1987, Microsoft became “the number one seller of computer software” (Sherman 31). It wasn’t until 1990, when Windows 3.0 was launched, and Microsoft spent $10 million on advertisements, that Microsoft finally saw its ultimate success with its operating system (Sherman

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