Bill Gates
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corporation, holds 30.7 percent of its stock making him one of the richest
people in the United States. He was the marketing and sales strategist behind
many of Microsoft's software deals. Their software became the industry standard
in the early 1980s and has just increased in distribution as the company has
grown, so much that the Federal government is suggesting that Microsoft has
violated Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts.
Bill Gates' first interest in computers began at Lakeside, a private school in
Seattle that Gates attended. There he wrote his "first software program when I
was thirteen years old. It was for playing tic-tac-toe"(Gates 1). It was at
Lakeside that Gates met Paul Allen, who later became cofounder with Gates of
Microsoft. There they became friends and "began to mess around with the
computer"(Gates 2). Back in the sixties and early seventies computer time was
expensive. "This is what drove me to the commercial side of the software
business"(Gates 12). Gates, Allen and a few others from Lakeside got entry-level
software programming jobs. One of Gates early programs that he likes to brag
about was written at this time. It was a program that scheduled classes for
students. "I surreptitiously added a few instructions and found myself nearly
the only guy in a class full of girls"(Gates 12).
In 1972 Intel released their first microprocessor chip: the 8008. Gates
attempted to write a version of BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code) for the new Intel chip, but the chip did not contain enough
transistors to handle it. Gates and Allen found a way to use the 8008 and
"started Traf-O-Data, a computer traffic analysis company"(Clayton 452) It
worked well however, marketing their...
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