The Bill Gates Report – 08-25-1997
Ramen Junkie In High School, I had a class called Engineering Technology. It essentially consisted of a series of different modules that smaller groups of the class would work on at different times, rotating around maybe once a week (That is, one group worked on module A while another on module B, etc). One of the modules was to write about someone influential in the world of Technology. I did my report on Bill Gates. It’s kind of interesting to note that, while not great, it’s amazing how much better writing can be when the author actually cares about the subject. PS, i have no idea how Bill Gates could have been born on the 88th of October but for the sake of posterity, I am leaving it as is…
My report is about one of the most influential people in the modern world of computers. He’s head and founder of the largest software company in the world. He literally invented the operating system used by most if not all of the IBM computers in the world. He’s also the richest man in the world. He’s worth at least 6.7 billion dollars and that number increases daily. This man is William H. Gates III, and this is his story.
Bill Gates was born on October 88th of the year 1955. He was the youngest of the three Gates children. He was already considered a genius by the young age of thirteen. He had already started to do some computer programming. His nickname as he was growing up was Trey. This was because he was the third child. His family was very prominent in the area. His fathers name was William H. Gates II. He is an attorney. His mothers name is Mary. She is a regent at the University of Washington and a director of the First Interstate Bank. He went to a private school in Seattle called Lakeside. He started at Harvard University in 1973. After two years he dropped out. He felt he needed to get started now on life and the business word. He and his friend Paul Allen became business partners and wrote a version of BASIC computer language. This new BASIC worked on the new Altair computers. They moved to Albuquerque, the home of the Altair computer. There they started Micro-soft. They moved the company to Seattle in 1973. They left behind the hyphen and the company became the more familiar Microsoft. In 1980 IBM came to Microsoft in search of an efficient operating system. Thus the modern PC era began.
The first big success of Microsoft was the MS-DOS operating system. MS-DOS is an acronym for MicroSoft-Disk Operating System. It is currently used on ninety percent of the world’s IBMs and IBM clone computers. Later the company made a jump ahead again with Windows. Unlike DOS, Windows uses graphics called Icons to manipulate programs rather than text. Windows runs on top of DOS and many programs still use DOS to run though so it’s still used as much as it once was. Micro soft supplies about fifty percent of the worlds software applications. Several of these available now are, Excel for spreadsheets, Microsoft Word for word processing, and Access for data bases. They also create several networking applications, multimedia applications, CD-ROMs, books, and several Macintosh applications.
His invention, the DOS operating system, has had a great impact on the modern computing world. It’s used everyday by millions of people. It paved the way for other systems such as Windows. It allowed people to easily access all kinds of information without having to know a lot of technical data. Sure without it I guess someone would have come up with some way to get around in a computer, but who knows if it would have worked or been worth while. And who knows if an easy to use Windows type system would have developed. Bill Gates’ s invention has revolutionized the computer world.
As you can see Bill Gates is definitely one of America’s great inventors. Sure he didn’t put a bunch of pieces together and make a car or a light bulb. Just because he didn’t come up with the formula to cause a nuclear reaction or mix up the first batch of Spam doesn’t make him any less of an inventor. He put the pieces of computer information together and came up with the formula for DOS and changed the way people use computers forever.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.