By founding Microsoft with the help of Paul Allen, Bill Gates became the founder of one of the world’s software giants. The company he founded, after some time, became the leader of the computer operating system industry and took a major share of this lucrative market. During his career at Microsoft, he held various positions, including CEO, Chairman of the Board of Directors, and Head of the Software Architecture Department. In recent years, Bill Gates has chosen to work at Microsoft as a part-time job and has focused on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to use his wealth and knowledge to help needy people around the world with various needs.

Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. His parents, William H. Gates, a prominent lawyer, and Mary Maxwell. They met and got married at the University of Washington. The Gates family has two daughters and one son, Bill being the second child in the family. The environment of this family’s home was always warm and the children were encouraged to work hard to achieve success. In the Gates family, there was always a game and competition going on, and the winners were cheered. In this way, the spirit of competition sprouted in Bale from his childhood years. From the beginning, Bill’s parents had in mind a career in law and advocacy for him; But he showed his interest in computers during his school years.

Bill Gates entered Lakeside School at the age of 13, and his computer adventure began at that time. School officials provided students with a Teletype Model 33 ASR, one of the first typewriters, along with a General Electric computer. Bill was fascinated by this device from the very beginning and was very interested in writing programs for this system in BASIC. His great interest in programming made his teachers exempt him from math class so that he could pursue his interests. Bill Gates wrote his first computer program in the form of a Tic-Tac-Toe game on this device and was surprised by its performance.

After that device was removed from the school, Bill and his other hobbyist friends began working on minicomputers. One of these minicomputers was a PDP-10 model owned by Computer Center Corporation. The center allowed students from Lakeside School to use its computers. By discovering a bug in the company’s systems, Bill and his 3 other friends, Paul Allen, Rick Wieland, and Kent Evans, were getting more time to use computers. After discovering this, CCC fired them from the organization for a while. Of course, after the dismissal period, the company used these 4 students to discover bugs in the company’s systems in exchange for overtime working with the computer.

While working with CCC, Bill also studied and learned languages ​​such as Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. After CCC closed down in 1970, these 4 genius students collaborated with Information Sciences to develop payroll software. Seeing Bill’s talent and genius, school administrators let him develop software to schedule students’ classes. Gates continued his success in the field of computer science, and at the age of 17, with the help of his longtime friend Alan, he developed traffic counting software on an Intel 8008 processor. Gates served as an honorary member of the United States House of Representatives in 1973. This is an honorary, official membership in the House of Representatives that invites high school seniors to do administrative work.

Bill Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973 and received the National Merit Scholarship. He entered Harvard University in the fall of 1973. Bill, who first chose the field of law, after a while chose most of his courses around mathematics and computer science. At the same university, Gates met Steve Ballmer, who later gave him the position of CEO of Microsoft in 2000. Although Bill Gates was studying in one of the most prestigious universities in the world; he had no specific curriculum and spent most of his time working with the university’s computers.

Gates and Allen kept in touch during their student days. In 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 computer was released. This computer was built using an Intel 8080 processor. Seeing this device, Gates and Allen thought of starting their own software company. At this time, Gates dropped out of college to focus on programming. His parents, who saw their son’s interest in computers and programming, supported his decision.

In January 1975, Bill Gates saw the news of the Altair 8800 computer in an article in Popular Electronics magazine. He quickly contacted the executives at MITS, the makers of this computer, and announced that he was developing a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In fact, Gates and Allen did not do any work for this computer; Because they did not have the Altair computer at all. They just wanted to get the attention of the manufacturing company. After the manager of MITS agreed to meet with them and see a demo, the two installed a simulation of the Altair computer on a minicomputer and ran their BASIC interpreter on it. The meeting ended successfully and it was decided that Gates and Allen would develop their own interpreter called Altair BASIC.

After this success, Allen was hired by MITS, and Gates dropped out of college to help him with the project. They named their partnership Micro-Soft and established their first office in Albuquerque. After a year, the collaboration continued with more strength, and in 1976, the Microsoft company was officially registered. Bill Gates never returned to Harvard to finish his studies.

Microsoft’s Altair BASICS software was welcomed by users. After some time, Bill realized that there were many copies of their software available to different people and being copied. For this reason, he wrote a letter to the employees and managers of MITS, in which he stated that distributing the software without permission without paying them would cause problems for the company, and professional programmers may not be interested in developing software from now on. Bill’s letter and the problem he mentioned were rare until then, But he hoped to get his point across about the right of developers to charge for each piece of software.

Microsoft separated from MITS in 1976 and continued its core business of developing software for various systems. The founders of this company moved the main office from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979. In the early years, Microsoft employees had many duties and responsibilities. For example, in the first 5 years, Bill Gates himself checked all software codes and rewrote them if necessary.

IBM entered into negotiations with Microsoft in 1980. The company commissioned Gates to develop the operating system for its new personal computer called the IBM PC. Of course, the beginning of negotiations was for the development of a BASIC translator. When, in the middle of negotiations, an IBM representative mentioned the company’s need for an operating system, Gates introduced Digital Research, the developer of the CP/M operating system, to them. IBM’s negotiations with this company did not go well and they shared the problems with Gates. After a few weeks, Gates offered them 86-DOS or QDOS. This operating system was similar to CP/M and belonged to Seattle Computer Products. Gates negotiated with this company and got permission from them to distribute points. After some time, Gates received the full score of this operating system. After obtaining the license, Microsoft sold this operating system to IBM under the name PC DOS or MS-DOS.

The high sales of IBM systems and the MS-DOS operating system made Microsoft a new and powerful player in the operating system industry. Although the name of IBM was on this operating system, all experts and critics considered Gates to be the main man of this operating system. On June 25, 1981, Bill Gates changed the management structure of Microsoft and started working as the main director and chairman of the board.

In 1983, the Microsoft hardware group released a new device to communicate with the computer called Mouse. With the help of a graphical interface, this device made it easy for the user to communicate with the computer, and in a way, it was the beginning of the era of graphical communication between the user and the operating system. In the same year, the company released a text editor for MS-DOS, and alongside it, the first version of the popular Windows operating system was released. Windows at that time was mostly an extension of MS-DOS that was used for graphics software. Windows was so popular that by 1993, the number of registered users reached 25 million people, and Microsoft’s product became the most popular operating system in the world.

From 1975 to 2006, Bill Gates was responsible for the company’s product strategy. One of the negative characteristics of Gates in management is his unavailability. Microsoft’s second-tier executives have always been frustrated and angry that they couldn’t easily reach him for a call or a message. Bill Gates was a manager who showed the characteristics of competition in all his personal behaviors. If someone beat him in a simple game, he would spend some time studying this game and surely defeat him in the next game.

Bill Gates had regular meetings with his subordinates. During the meetings, he used to argue and fight to achieve the desired result. He always asked managers to disclose possible weaknesses in their plans that might hurt the company in the long run. In many management meetings, Gates interrupted people with a harsh tone. When the presentation was interrupted, the other person had to try to defend his plan in every detail, which eventually satisfied Bill.

In the early years of management at Microsoft, Gates was also in charge of software design and development; But after a while, he only played the role of management and guidance, and only on rare occasions, his codes were used in software.

Despite all the competition in the history of the world’s 2 software giants, Apple and Microsoft, these companies have created many of their early innovations by collaborating with each other. In 1981, Apple, under the management of Steve Jobs, invited Microsoft and its development team to develop software for the company’s Macintosh operating system. At that time, several joint teams were working for these two companies, and this collaboration is evident in the names of some of these companies’ applications.

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Cooperation and information sharing with Apple made Microsoft able to develop Windows. The Windows operating system was graphically very similar to the Macintosh that Apple introduced 2 years ago. Apple had previously given full access to Microsoft engineers so they could optimize their software to work on the Macintosh. At the same time, Gates proposed to Apple to license their software; But Apple, which was more concerned with selling computers and hardware, ignored this advice.

Gates took advantage of the situation created in cooperation with Apple and designed software very similar to the Macintosh. Apple threatened to sue Microsoft when Windows was released; But in response, Microsoft threatened Apple with the late release of the software. Finally, a court was formed for this purpose, and Microsoft was able to convince the court that its product, despite the graphic similarities and the way of development, has fundamental differences with the Macintosh in performance.

Bill Gates has been widely recognized as the richest person in the world since 1987. For many years, he has been at the top of the second and third positions of the world’s billionaires. Time magazine called him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century and has presented him as the face of the year for many years.

Bill Gates never finished his university education, But he has received many honorary doctorates from prestigious universities in the world. Brooklyn, Stockholm, Waseda, Karolinska, Cambridge and Harvard universities are some of the universities that gave Bill Gates an honorary doctorate in the years 2000 to 2007. In a ceremony held at Harvard University in 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the university he once left. “My father told me to go back to Harvard to finish my education and get my degree,” he joked at the event. “Dad, I came back today and got my degree.”

In 2005, Bill Gates  received the KBE or Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire from the Queen of England. Many of the other awards that Gates has received are for philanthropic activities and he shared these awards with his wife, Melinda. In 2016, US President Barack Obama presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bill and Melinda Gates. French President Francis Hollande also awarded the country’s highest honor to the couple in 2017.

Biography of Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft

Bill Gates married Melinda French on January 1, 1994, at the age of 38. They celebrated their marriage on a golf course on the island of Lanai in the Hawaiian Islands. The fruit of the marriage of Bill and Melinda Gates is 3 children named Jennifer Catherine, Rory John, and Phoebe Adele. The Gates family lives in a modern mansion in Medina, Washington. This mansion, which has a beautiful view of Washington Lake, was built on a land of 6100 square meters. This mansion is called Xanadu 2.0 because of its design, dimensions, and special technologies used in it. Xanadu is the name of the mansion of the first character in the movie Citizen Kane.