Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
B.8.10. Bill Gates is one of the best-known faces of the personal computer revolution and it
would be hard to find a person who would not recognize his name. At the age of thirteen, he
was enrolled in Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school in Seattle. When Gates was
in eighth grade the school purchased an ASR-33 teletype and some computer time for students
on a GE computer and he wrote his first BASIC programs. With Paul Allen and some other
Lakeside students, he was allowed free use of a DEC PDP-10 computer at the nearby offices of
the Computer Center Corporation provided they assisted in debugging the operating system
software. At age seventeen, Gates and Allen formed their first joint venture called Traf-O-Data
for making hardware and software for automating a traffic counting system. The enterprise was
not a success but Gates and Allen developed valuable experience and a powerful set of tools for
the PDP-10. Gates graduated from Lakeside in 1973 and enrolled at Harvard. Publication of the
January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics stimulated Allen and Gates to develop a basic interpreter
for the Altair 8800 computer. In 1976 they established Microsoft Corporation to develop software
for the growing microcomputer market. Microsoft's partnership with IBM to develop the MS-DOS
operating system for the IBM PC was a critical step for the company. Bill Gates had a remarkable
vision for Microsoft: “a personal computer on every desk and in every home.” With the advent
of the Internet and the World Wide Web, in 1995 Gates turned the company around to embrace
the Web with his famous “The Internet is a tidal wave” memo. In 2006 Bill Gates transitioned
out of his day-to-day involvement with Microsoft and now devotes a significant amount of his
time to philanthropic activities with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (B.8.11). With fellow
billionaire Warren Buffett, Gates champions the cause of “creative capitalism” - a combination of
capitalism and philanthropy to solve some of the urgent problems facing the world.
arguments, a federal judge dismissed Apple's lawsuit in 1992, ruling that “Apple
cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the
idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]. . . .” 26 In Walter Isaacson's biog-
raphy of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates is quoted as ending an angry meeting with Jobs by
saying: “Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think
it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his
house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” 27
A post-PC era?
With the progress of Moore's law, the scale of computers has been extended
from large “mainframe” business computers to microprocessor-based personal
computers. From Osborne's first portable computer - which was more “lug-
gable” than truly portable - we now have smart phones and tablets that are
rapidly changing the way we interact with computers. These are more than
just new “form factors” for the PC where the term form factor refers to the size,
B.8.11. Melinda and Bill Gates visiting with mothers taking part in a malaria intervention
treatment program at the Manhiça Health Research Center in Mozambique. Bill and Melinda
announced in Manhiça that their foundation was awarding three grants totaling $168 million
to fight malaria. The grants will accelerate the search for a malaria vaccine, new drugs to fight
drug-resistant malaria, and new treatment strategies for children.
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