Gates grew up in an upper-middle-class family with his older sister, Kristianne, and younger sister, Libby. Their father, William H. Gates Sr. She was an athletic, outgoing student at the University of Washington, actively involved in student affairs and leadership. The Gates family atmosphere was warm and close, and all three children were encouraged to be competitive and strive for excellence.
Gates showed early signs of competitiveness when he coordinated family athletic games at their summer house on Puget Sound. He also relished in playing board games Risk was his favorite and excelled at Monopoly.
Gates had a very close relationship with his mother, Mary, who after a brief career as a teacher devoted her time to helping raise the children and working on civic affairs and with charities.
She would often take Gates along when she volunteered in schools and at community organizations. Gates was a voracious reader as a child, spending many hours poring over reference books such as the encyclopedia. Around the age of 11 or 12, Gates's parents began to have concerns about his behavior. He was doing well in school, but he seemed bored and withdrawn at times, and his parents worried he might become a loner.
Though they were strong believers in public education, when Gates turned 13, his parents enrolled him at Seattle's exclusive preparatory Lakeside School.
He blossomed in nearly all his subjects, excelling in math and science, but also doing very well in drama and English. While at Lakeside School, a Seattle computer company offered to provide computer time for the students.
The Mother's Club used proceeds from the school's rummage sale to purchase a teletype terminal for students to use.
Gates became entranced with what a computer could do and spent much of his free time working on the terminal. He wrote a tic-tac-toe program in BASIC computer language that allowed users to play against the computer. Gates graduated from Lakeside in He scored out of on the college SAT test, a feat of intellectual achievement that he boasted about for several years when introducing himself to new people.
Gates enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of , originally thinking of a career in law. Much to his parents' dismay, Gates dropped out of college in to pursue his business, Microsoft, with partner Allen. Gates spent more of his time in the computer lab than in class.
He did not really have a study regimen; he got by on a few hours of sleep, crammed for a test, and passed with a reasonable grade. Gates met Allen, who was two years his senior, in high school at Lakeside School. The pair became fast friends, bonding over their common enthusiasm for computers, even though they were very different people.
Allen was more reserved and shy. Gates was feisty and at times combative. Regardless of their differences, Allen and Gates spent much of their free time together working on programs. Occasionally, the two disagreed and would clash over who was right or who should run the computer lab.
On one occasion, their argument escalated to the point where Allen banned Gates from the computer lab. At one point, Gates and Allen had their school computer privileges revoked for taking advantage of software glitches to obtain free computer time from the company that provided the computers. After their probation, they were allowed back in the computer lab when they offered to debug the program.
During this time, Gates developed a payroll program for the computer company the boys had hacked into and a scheduling program for the school. In , at the age of 15, Gates and Allen went into business together, developing "Traf-o-Data," a computer program that monitored traffic patterns in Seattle.
Gates and Allen wanted to start their own company, but Gates' parents wanted him to finish school and go on to college, where they hoped he would work to become a lawyer. Allen went to Washington State University, while Gates went to Harvard, though the pair stayed in touch. After attending college for two years, Allen dropped out and moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to work for Honeywell. Around this time, he showed Gates an edition of Popular Electronics magazine featuring an article on the Altair mini-computer kit.
Both young men were fascinated with the possibilities of what this computer could create in the world of personal computing. Gates and Allen contacted the company, proclaiming that they were working on a BASIC software program that would run the Altair computer.
In reality, they didn't have an Altair to work with or the code to run it, but they wanted to know if MITS was interested in someone developing such software.
It worked perfectly. Together they founded Microsoft. Allen remained with Microsoft until , when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. Bill Gates wrote his first computer program when he was 13 years old. It was a program to play farmer-chess on. The computer he used was big, heavy, and slow and he was totally obsessed. The computer did not have a screen, so they made there move, and they ran over to a big printer and looked at the score or who had won. If they did it on paper each move would take about 30 sec.
This was the start of a business partnership between Gates and Allen, who would go on to found Microsoft in their early 20s. At age 26, Gates became a millionaire and in , just months before his 31st birthday , he became a billionaire. As personal computers became increasingly popular in the 90s, Microsoft reinforced its position as a dominant tool with the release of Microsoft Office.
Since stepping down as Microsoft CEO in , Gates has focused much of his time on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he works on global healthcare, education and poverty. As for his future goals, the billionaire tells Reddit users this: "Now I am working on being a good father and the ambitious goals of the Foundation including getting rid of polio and malaria. One described Gates's criticism as "devastating. At the same time though, he took responsibility.
During the first five years, when he was overseeing all of the business aspects of the company, he also oversaw and often rewrote every line of code in the company's products. Obviously easier said than done, but Gates saw the future first at several key moments. As a result, Microsoft was able to license the OS to other vendors who cloned IBM's machine, thus making a much bigger and more profitable market for his company.
More chillingly: Gates has said recently he's concerned about the threats of super-intelligent machines on humanity. Let's hope he's not seeing this prediction as clearly. In some ways this should be the first item on the list, as truly successful people first choose endeavors worthy of their time. In Gates's case, fast-forward to the s, after he transitioned out of Microsoft and became a full-time philanthropist.
0コメント