Bill gates
Gates himself is no visionary; he is a technology groupie with a genius for showing up, for being at the right place at the right time. His secret is revealed in that old photo with Paul Allen. He is a man who likes computers very much. Not their intellectual underpinnings, not the physics or electronics, not the art or philosophy or mathematics of software—just plain computers. He's crazy about them. It seems like an odd passion, but after all, some people are crazy about Pop-Tarts. And Gates will be remembered alongside Pop-Tarts, in the long run, as vintage Americana, a sign of the times. A little on the bland side perhaps, unexciting, not awfully deep, not to everyone's taste, but not all that bad.
BORN Oct. 28, 1955, in Seattle
1975 Drops out of Harvard to co-found Microsoft with Paul Allen
1980 Licenses MS-DOS to IBM for its inaugural PC
1986 Becomes billionaire at 31 with company IPO
1990 Releases Windows 3.0, a hit, user-friendly answer to the Mac OS
1995-96 Debuts Windows 95 and Internet Explorer browser for the Net age
1998 Justice Department files antitrust suit against Microsoft
Gates is the Bing Crosby of American technology, borrowing a tune here and there Granted he is (to put it delicately) an unusually hard-driving and successful businessman,
A 1968 photo shows Bill as a rapt young teenager, watching his friend Paul Allen type at a computer terminal. Allen became a co-founder of Microsoft. The child Gates has neat hair and an eager, pleasant smile; every last detail says "pat me on the head." He entered Harvard but dropped out to found Microsoft in 1975.
Microsoft's first product was a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair 8800, arguably the world's first personal computer. BASIC, invented by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz in 1964, was someone else's idea. So was the Altair. Gates merely plugged one into the other, cream-cheesed the waiting bagel and came up with a giant hit.
By 1980, IBM had decided to build personal computers and needed a PC operating system. (Computers are born naked; they need operating systems to be presentable.), blue-chip IBM employed thousands of capable software builders, and didn't trust a single one of them; IBM hired Microsoft to build its operating system. Microsoft bought Q-DOS from a company called Seattle Computer Products and retailored it for the PC. The PC was released in August 1981 and was followed into the market by huge flocks of honking, beeping clones. Microsoft's DOS was one of 3 official PC operating systems but quickly beat out the other 2. DOS was clunky and primitive at a time when the well-dressed computer was wearing UNIX from Bell Labs or some variant of the revolutionary window-menu-mouse system that Xerox had pioneered in the 1970s. But despite (or maybe because of) its stodginess, DOS established itself as the school uniform of computing. It was homely, but everyone needed it. Once again, Gates had brokered a marriage between other people's ideas and come up with a hit. DOS was even bigger than Basic. Gates had it made.
Apple released the Macintosh in January 1984: a tony, sophisticated computer was now available to the masses. Henceforth DOS was
not merely homely, it was obsolete. But it continued to rake in money, so what if the critics hated it? In May 1990, Microsoft finally perfected its own version of Apple windows and called it Microsoft Windows 3.0-- another huge hit. Now Gates really had it made.
By the early '90s, electronic mail and the Internet were big. The World Wide Web emerged in 1994, making browsers necessary, and Netscape was founded that same year. Sun Microsystems developed Java, the Internet programming language. Gates hung back. It wasn't until 1996 that Microsoft finally, according to Gates himself, "embraced the Internet wholeheartedly. Microsoft's first browser, Internet Explorer 1.0, was licensed from a company called Spyglass. It was an afterthought, available off the shelf as part of a $45
CD-ROM crammed with random tidbits. Today Microsoft is the world's most powerful supplier of Web browsers, and Gates really has it made. The U.S. Justice Department is suing Microsoft for throwing its weight around illegally, hitting companies like Netscape below the belt. The trial is under way. Whoever wins, Gates will still be the No. 1 man in the industry.
The world pondered Gates and assumed he must be a great thinker.