The Genius of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and Windows Changed the World
INTRODUCTION Bill Gates computer skills helped make him one of the wealthiest people on Earth Bill Gates was confident The teen from Seattle Washington was still in high school but his skills were in demand He had mastered several computer languages including BASIC and COBOL He knew how to program computers At that time in the early 1970s very few people had that ability 4
Bill had already put his skills to the test several times Along with friends in the Lakeside School computer club he had tested a mainframe computer for a team of engineers from the University of Washington The engineers wanted the Lakeside club to find bugs in their code and gave the students free computing time in exchange for their work After successfully completing that project Lakeside hired Bill to computerize the school’s class scheduling system Next Bill and fellow computer club member Paul Allen formed a company called Traf-O-Data They designed a computer system for analyzing traffic patterns for city governments Bill believed that his computer skills would make him rich He imagined running a big computer company But the high schooler had no idea just how big his business would become A young Gates right and Paul Allen at Lakeside School in 1970 5
Harvard Square in the 1970s CHAPTER 1 THE BEGINNING After high school Gates enrolled at Harvard University in Cambridge Massachusetts He majored in math Paul Allen who was two years older than Gates studied at Washington State University for a couple years before taking a programming job with the Honeywell Corporation The job was in Boston near Cambridge so the two friends remained close 6
Because of advances in microprocessors computers were getting smaller Gates and Allen believed that someday everyone would have a personal computer at home They talked about forming a company to write software for personal computers The Altair 8800 one of the first personal computers 7
